The film is harrowing, horrifying, and left my roommate, who was unfamiliar with the book, deeply affected. This, surely, is a fine definition of a horror film.

But, look up its genre. The Road is a Drama. What is it that makes this a Drama rather than a Horror? Its obviously not blood and guts, nor the emotions we are confronted by that make a film exclusive to the Horror genre. Even terrifying films like Aliens, a classic of my childhood, is it a Horror, with its strange creatures and chest-bursting blood? Nope, listed as a Sci-fi. Ask most film critics to name a classic Horror movie, you'll get examples like Universal's Frankenstein and Dracula, the films of 70 years ago, and mostly for their technical achievements. If you asked for examples of good, classic horror movies, you'd find few in the film communities that could site one. Horror is often defined as a schlocky, throwaway film genre, a banner most directors, outside of Sam Raimi and a few others, refuse to let their work be categorized under.

The Road. A Drama. I pondered this for a moment and realized that it was not categorized as Horror by Cast, Crew or Distributor because of one reason: it was good. Horror is a title reserved for, as much as I love it, traditionally very bad films. And as someone who loves horror films, I have to ask what my appreciation for generally poor movies says about me. Who are we as horror fans, and what do we want out of our favorite genre?

There certainly is a 'Horror community', and it is growing quickly. Just go to any horror convention, like the new Trinity of Terror here in Las Vegas, and you'll find hundreds of others, all obsessed with devils, monsters and serial killers, all gathered to share stories and swap merchandise. There are Horror clubs out there to boot, horror movies are reliable teen draws at the box office, and the population of female horror fans has grown tremendously over the years, no doubt drawn in by the scream queens and their portrayal as the heroin and, ultimately, soul survivor of most horror flicks. But, again, who are we, and what is this community?

I suppose that question has to first be answered personally. What do I get out of horror movies? As a youth, I know I was fascinated with monsters. Slashers did nothing for me, unless maybe they had an interesting look like Michael Myers. Jason was a zombie by this point, so he was more than a guy in a hockey mask. But monsters, oh, they scared the hell out of me and kept me coming back for more. I was convinced that Pinhead was real and that one day, he and the rest of the cenobites would find me in the dark hallway of my grandparents' home. Horror movies had a unique thrill, a bit of adrenaline from that fear rush, and also a fascination, the creativity and imagination behind the creature design. Nothing was as cool as new, unique monster. Now, as an adult, I still think that I must find that rush enticing. It is true that overtime we become desensitized to fear, to joy, the extremes of emotion. Its easier, a quick fix, to be scared or exhilarated by something like a rollercoaster, or a Freddy flick, than to succeed at work or find love. Horror is the drug I use for stimulation.

Beyond that, there's also the comforts of it. Horror hasn't really evolved much in the last 30 years. Despite all of the technological advances we've made, the penultimate creations we've put together are glossier versions of Freddy, Jason, and the Wolfman. It all still boils down to a guy in a mask cutting people apart. Now part of the fun of watching Horror is being able to tell in advance when someone is about to get stabbed, or seeing how long of a wait there is between tit shots. Most Horror fans can dissect a movie, beat by beat, from watching the first 15 minutes of a feature.

So that's me. What do the rest of you come here for? I recently had Jamie, the head honcho around here, send me a list of Google links to see what people were most often searching for when they came to BthroughZ. (You didn't know they recorded that, didja?) The results were startling. Common amongst the searches were inquiries to the death of Sean McGee, hip hop artist (He's not dead but 90% of the online community seems to think he is, eulogy videos for him popping up on Youtube regularly), and inquiries about slit-mouth woman, an urban legend in Japan. These were a little odd, but it was one particular result that came up top of the list in October and then again in January that turned my head: safe sex with dogs.

Safe sex with dogs? What other kinds deviant sexual acts were Horror fans looking for? Searches for real rape, wife rape, dead bitch, kill my wife, wife is a bitch, virgin raped, dirty rape, nurses raped, family raped, dogs for sex, raped dead women, real dead women, snuff film italian, and the list goes on. Oh sure, there were plenty of searches for specific movies, people interested in learning about The Halloween Tree, or where the song Zydrate Addiction is from (Repo, The Genetic Opera), and even some amusing ones like 'are cockteases sociopaths?', but the most common single thing that lead people to our humble Horror abode was a search for rape and abused women. What is really thought provoking is that those searches only bring people to BthroughZ because we've written enough about rape and the stalking of women (and, it would seem, sex with dogs) to give them something to link to. The content reflects its audience.

Now, one thing I've always enjoyed about Horror is how it tends to reflects the fears of a society. You can tell a lot about a people by looking at what strikes terror into them. In films like The Ring, The Sixth Sense, The Unborn, The Brood, we constantly have a theme of possessed or ghostly children popping up, and indeed fears about childbirth or weird children with powers we can't fathom have been prevalent since storytelling became a concept. Common, especially in America, are stories about hillbillies, cannibals, and stalker woodsmen in our backyards, a theme which goes back into stories like Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth, seeming to reflect the fear of our own corrupted genealogy, the relatives we don't want to show off, those backwater tribes of people who refuse to advance or adapt, the weird neighbors that may hide an animal brutality and taste for human flesh. Zombies seem to represent humans desensitized and turned against themselves, Hellraiser was a story about the excesses of drugs and sex in the yuppie 80's, Dracula was a not-so-subtle metaphor about how those dirty European immigrants were stealing all of our women and spreading disease to the aristocrats of England. These might be over-simplified a bit, but you get the idea; the real horrors of our uncaring world become the monsters of our cinema. They vindicate us.

Over time, horror stories lose their potency. We aren't terrified by Leatherface now so much as entertained by him. Frightening as he is, many Horror fans root for him so that he can return in the eventual sequel. As has been pointed out on BthroughZ before, Freddy Krueger should be one of the most hated beasts of the film world, he's a murderer and a child molester. Yet dolls and comics and TV shows starring him abound. Lord knows, I had the Freddy Krueger board game. What is it that turns our monsters into our heroes?

The one linking factor between all of these things, the search results, the fears and feelings of a society, and why we root for these serial monsters... could it be misogyny? Sexual deviancy for a certainty. One of the other common aspects of horror movies is that of the 'survival girl', the idea that one very smart, often virginal, girl stands out from the rest of the pack to live. Of course, this demands that we not only have a pack of girls, but we have the others behave reprehensibly in order to make her stand out. In something like Suspiria, all of the other girls are uppity little twats, greedy and mean, in order to make young Suzy a more likable character, but you don't want to see anything but death happen to those girls, they're so detestable. Friday the 13th is famous for having all of the guys be drunken stoners, and parading around and endless array of topless girls with no personally redeeming values, a pile of nameless, faceless cleavage that Jason can rip apart to the apparent thrill of the audience.

So... okay, here's where we try to tie all of this stuff together.

Studios don't think horror has any sort of redeeming value. They take a basic script with familiar beats, throw a small bit of money at it, and know that people will come back for more, wanting to see fresh vixens torn apart by another new lunatic, perhaps this time in 3-D. Due to the low budgets, they're able to take in a few million, even with mediocre attendance. That is the nature of horror to them, a cheap, disposable commodity, a curiosity, that people without discerning taste will show up to for the tits and the blood.

Is this really horror's audience? When I go to conventions, I see crowds of smiling, happy faces. I see friendships. You do see plenty of teens that you can tell don't mesh with conventional society, lots of rockers and metal kids, plenty of fat and nerdy comic book types, pale and pimply girls, lots of people who are looking for community. And Horror, for them, is providing that. There is a kinship amongst Horror fans, people who come and seek family and kinship through a common love. Its there; who doesn't love to get together with a group of friends, turn down the lights, pop up some corn and scream and laugh at the terror on screen? It seems to me that Horror's audience is made of good people.

Despite that, no matter how clean our appearances may be, one has to wonder at what all of these people want from their Horror. Even we here at BthroughZ, the purveyors of the finest horror, excuse the low production values, the crap acting, all for the sake of blood and boobs. 'Is it fun?' we often ask. The grindhouse production style of horror movies seems to have become part of the process, something we expect. Should we ask for more from our horror?

And beyond that, beyond the production values and the dialog, in what way does Horror speak to us? Are we still seeking affirmation and therapy for our fears? Does Dracula still make us fear the shadowy outsider? Or is he just some hot super-powered guy that gets all the chicks; maybe Dracula has become something we want to be, a new kind of super-hero. Maybe Horror doesn't really represent our fears anymore, but rather our darkest desires. Have we come to the point where we want to be the vampire? We want to be wise cracking, vengeance getting Freddy Krueger? And maybe that's why we see the misogyny on screen, its a way of working out some sort of dominance fantasy, the kind of power we wish we could exhibit over the aggressive, drug addled women of the movie world. Maybe the ever-growing female horror audience likes to watch that kind of woman get brutally raped and killed, and feels superior to that kind of woman, thinking themselves to be more like the survivor girl.

Its something that's worth some deep thought. I think back to all the friendly, cool people I met at Trinity of Terror, and how even the most mischievious guys, startling the ladies in their creepy costumes, were so open and happy to talk about movies. And then, I have to correlate those people with search topics like 'run bitch run' and 'italian snuff videos'. Even myself and my friends from here at Bthrough Z, Ben, Vincent, Jamie, Angel, Janet, and all the other cool writers here I've gotten to know over the past year and a bit... we often talk about horror films on and off of these forums, and its interesting how often our favorite parts of movies are the breasts of some girl who was on the screen, and then, subsequently, how they were cut off with a bandsaw, or what have you. Is our common link that we like to be scared by movies? Or is our common link the fact that we're no longer scared by the movies, and simply enjoy watching buxom ladies be dismembered?

Now, I'm not saying there's not room for both types of movie watchers out there, or that a person is just in one block or the other. Obviously there is a large gay community to whom Nightmare on Elm St. 2 speaks to on a spiritual level, and there are people who have had abortions who are probably frightened to the point of pooping their pants by Imprint. But there is an army of casual horror fans out there too, who enjoy the throwaway nature of the genre, and dig watching young women get slaughtered simply for the enjoyment of the act itself. Story? What story? Where are the tits/intestines?

I don't have the answers to these questions. I'm sure we could go on a journey together and find them, but it would take a lot more research, and lot longer to accomplish than these four paltry pages. What I think is important, though, is that we all look, really look at horror, and ourselves. All of us come here, gather at BthroughZ on a monthly basis, put hours of our lives into reading and writing about horror films because, frankly, we love and respect the genre. But we are defined by the company we keep, yes? So what is it that keeps you coming back to horror? What is it that you find in these movies that resonates with you? Do you demand a better movie? Does it reflect something that terrifies you? Or are you just so interested in finding clever re-enactments of the most brutal deaths imaginable?

When you're really into something like horror, it can't help but become a reflection, a mirror, of your own fears and desires. Take a moment to look at your collection, and think about what you enjoy about your favorite movies. In what ways do you influence horror and, more importantly, what does your taste in Horror say about you?