--- title: "Half way horror curse" subtitle: "When exposing the plot means losing the plot" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-03-12 08:00 date: 2025-03-12 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: film-1600x800.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: culture tag: [ movie, cinema, horror, review ] --- If you're a fan of horror movies, you may have experienced the half-way horror curse. It's that point at which a perfectly good horror movie that's been keeping you guessing for about 45 minutes finally reveals the monster to you, and then you promptly lose interest. It's the same problem, technically, as the romance story that allows the longing couple to finally kiss. Once they've kissed, the story loses its purpose. In a horror movie, the kiss is knowledge. Once you know the nature of the horror, the story loses its purpose. In horror movies, this often happens around the half-way point, and it is fraught with danger not for the characters in the movie, but for the storyteller and the audience. The expectation is that by the half-way point of a movie, you're so invested in whether the main character (or which one of a group of characters) is going to survive that it no longer matters how mysterious the killer is. The problem is, not all stories manage to tip the balance away from the mystery of the killer to the fate of the hero. Even in a movie that successfully sets up a hero we want to at least survive, we seem to be willing to sacrifice that hero for the allure of the unknowable. When you don't know what the trouble in the movie is, you're constantly engaged as you theorycraft possible causes, what you'd have done differently from the start, were you in the movie, and solutions the characters ought to try themselves now that they've reached each different point-of-no-return. Whether the hero survives or not doesn't matter any more, even when you want the hero to survive. What matters is what the hero is doing right or wrong, which itself can change based on new bits of information that emerge as the plot develops. This works well because all of the variables are never fully known, so we get to revise our better judgement constantly throughout the story. When a movie reveals the monster half-way through the story, plot development can sometimes stop. Once all the variables are known, the solution is often really obvious. Fight better, run faster, lock yourself in a safe place and hide until morning, or whatever. There's also the unfortunate chance that the monster doesn't live up to what the audience has imagined up to the reveal. This isn't fair to the storyteller or to the audience, it's just the nature of the interaction, but sometimes the story just doesn't live up to the head canon, even when the head canon is woefully incomplete. The audience doesn't have to have a better concept in mind to be disappointed by something that they wanted to be "I dunno, just better." There's no easy solution to the half-way horror curse, and that's in part because the curse doesn't even effect everyone equally. A monster reveal that disappoints me might be exactly what somebody else wanted out of the movie. A movie that eliminates all speculation by a monster reveal might still be engaging to me for any number of other reasons (including, absurdly, the soundtrack, which is literally something that can keep me engaged in a movie despite all else). It's different for every movie and for every person watching that movie. Knowing that the curse is half the battle. Recognising when it happens means you can take action to combat it. You can look for some other aspect of the movie to enjoy, or you can make mental notes on what you'd do differently for an imaginary remake, or you can just quit while you're ahead and watch something different. Like many curses in a horror movie, I don't think this curse is anybody's fault. It's a by-product of storytelling, and it's subject to situation and personal preference. Cursed or not, horror movies are entertaining for me, on both an emotional and an intellectual level. Emotionally, I enjoy a macabre and morbid work of fiction with lots of fake gore. Intellectually, I admire and appreciate the skill it takes to make an audience enjoy feeling uncomfortable. In fact, intellectually it seems impossible that movies and stories can convince a rational human mind that it's in danger when all evidence points to the contrary. Or maybe it's not impossible at all, and maybe that's the point.

Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash