Emotional Taxidermy: How Horror Lets Men Stuff Their Feelings in Film Theory Wrapping

by Vinnie C.

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There’s an old horror trope: the monster is never really dead, it just comes back wearing a different face. The same could be said for fear, especially the kind that crawls out during a horror movie, disguised as intellectual superiority.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: horror makes people feel things. Specifically? It makes men feel things. Things that are otherwise filed under "unmanly" in the cultural ledger: vulnerability, grief, helplessness, desire. Horror, after all, is a genre built on bodies, exposed, imperiled, and more often than not, punished. There’s no shame in admitting that. In fact, it’s the first step toward actual honesty.

Linda Williams, in her iconic essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, groups horror, porn, and melodrama as “body genres”, all designed to trigger involuntary, physical reactions. The moan, the sob, the scream. Different contexts, same muscle memory. Horror isn’t about intellectual exercise; it’s about an uninvited full-body experience.

But while the body confesses, the brain does damage control. For many men, the experience of watching horror isn’t about surrendering to emotion, but about enduring it. Fear, longing, heartbreak, all those inconvenient, unspeakably human emotions, get laundered through the language of "bravery." Watching horror isn’t described as feeling something. It’s sold as surviving something.

And just when you think the credits have rolled, the sequel begins. Enter: the self-anointed horror intellectual. You know the type. The guy who doesn’t just watch The Texas ChainSaw Massacre, he “appreciates its subtextual critique of post-Vietnam American malaise.” Loudly. Often unprompted.

Here, horror fandom evolves from adrenaline sport to academic cosplay. The feelings don’t disappear; they simply get buried under enough theory to pass for stoicism. Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema practically hands over the script for this particular performance: cinema, she writes, offers the male viewer two pleasures, to fetishize the female body or to punish it. Horror, ever the overachiever, lets you do both. You ogle the body. You watch it suffer. You leave the theater untouched but emotionally reconfigured, and then dissect the entire experience over beers, as if emotions only become legitimate once they've been embalmed in jargon.

But here’s the twist: horror doesn’t care about your credentials. It slips past the monologues and lands straight in your gut. Your Letterboxd review might praise “the masterful chiaroscuro amplifying dread,”,but your body still flinched like the film knew a secret it shouldn’t.

Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and ChainSaws sharpens the point with her “final girl” theory: slasher films quietly funnel male audiences into an act of cross-gender empathy. You don’t root for the killer, you root for the last girl standing, the one character allowed to scream, to bleed, to survive. Horror makes emotional identification inevitable. It just does so through the back door, under cover of adrenaline.

And this is usually where someone chimes in: Not all men, obviously. Of course not. But the same logic applies here as it does when you’re walking home at night and hear footsteps behind you. Maybe the man following you won’t hurt you. But in the moment, your fear isn’t about an individual stranger, it’s about the history, the pattern, the odds. Fear is rarely about you. It’s about everything that came before you. Horror operates the same way: it's not interested in your personal immunity. It’s interested in the system.

When someone says “I love horror,” it rarely translates to “I’m fascinated by the genre’s ability to confront mortality and the monstrosity of humanity.” More often, it’s code for: I’ve mastered it. I’ve survived.

But the genre, like any good haunting, tends to linger. That creeping unease. That half-formed nightmare hours later. The momentary hesitation passing a dark window. Horror doesn’t reward mastery. It exposes the illusion of it. The bravest thing a viewer can do isn’t survive the runtime, it’s admitting the film actually got to them.

So the next time someone queues up Hereditary or The Thing “for the craft,” don’t just watch the movie. Watch the person. The real performance isn’t on the screen, it’s the one sitting beside you, arms folded, voice steady, pulse betraying everything.