Persephone's (Gothic) Insights

This is part two of a two-part article on how "horror," as an umbrella term, is generally quite vague and often misunderstood, as inspired by a Baertaffy livestream of  The Darkest Dungeon (2016) where Baertaffy says he used to hate horror movies and still doesn't really like them. Read part one, here . Roger Ebert once complained that  Halloween II   wasn't a horror movie at all. Instead, he called it a geek show (a type of shock tactic: biting the heads off of live chickens). Here, Ebert is guilty of a certain myopic vision, himself; he knows horror more when he sees it, versus knowing what it is or isn't, ahead of time: "Mad Slasher Movies, they were called," he writes, "and they became a genre of their own, even inspiring a book of pseudo scholarship,  Splatter Movies , by John McCarty. His definition of a Splatter Film is concise and disheartening, and bears quoting: '[They] aim not to scare their audiences, necessarily, nor to dri...