By
Kati Aakkonen
Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!
Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.
Alice: Like what?!
Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.
Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)
This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.
Figure 1: Bill is convincing Alice that they’ll be laughing about it all tomorrow in Friday the 13th.
In films like 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers suspicions are voiced quite early on in the film, but in Friday the 13th, the misgivings about the situation can’t be qualified as a hunch anymore. When Alice and Bill are talking about leaving, most of their friends have gone missing, their boss hasn’t returned that day, phones and the car don’t work and they found a bloody axe in one of the beds. Alice is ready to get out of the camp but Bill – incredibly innocently – is not convinced something worrisome is going on. When Alice asks what could explain all the things that have gone wrong, Bill dodges the question and seems to think there can be an amusing explanation for everything.
This dynamic seems very familiar. Someone has a feeling that something is wrong, even though they can’t quite put their finger on what it is. Alice is ready to be uncertain and ambivalent about what is happening, but for Bill this is not possible. He appears confident in his certainty that they will laugh about it later, so Alice tries to silence her instincts. She has done this already once in the film, when she thinks about leaving early on, but her boss convinces her to stay. So many girls and women have been taught to trust (white and straight) boys and men instead of trusting their gut feelings.
Often in horror movies it is girls or young women who are the first to be worried, but being marginalized in other ways also makes wise horror characters. For example, Get Out (2017) is built around Black people’s experiences of everyday horrors and depicts how, in a racist society, Black people have not had the luxury to be confidently worry-free that nothing bad will happen to them. In the film, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) struggles between listening to and ignoring his discomfort when being objectified by his girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) relatives. Briana Dorley (2021) notes how the songs in Get Out are also urging Chris to listen to his instincts: the credit sequence’s “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga” can be translated “Listen to Your Ancestors,” and Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” warns the listener to “stay woke” and “don’t you close your eyes.”
Figure 2: Chris greets his girlfriend while the soundtrack is urging him to “stay woke” in Get Out.
The character who is complacently sure that nothing is going on is often a character with privilege. They are usually white, straight, cis-gender, middle-class and able bodied. Sometimes these characters are trying to manipulate potential victims to stay off their guard, but sometimes they are just overconfident. They are convinced that nothing can harm them, because they think they can successfully either control others or destroy them.
This incredulity has shades. For example, in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), the parents are convinced their son is either using drugs or insane, and in Urban Legend (1998), Paul (Jared Leto) doesn’t originally believe Natalie (Alicia Witt), the film’s final girl, but is willing to listen to her because he is interested in her.
The unwillingness to trust others’ instincts can stem from confusion about sensitive people’s ability to notice things that others miss. Or it can mean that the character is unwilling to accept there is danger because that would undermine their worldview. But I think it’s also because some people aren’t able or allowed to show uncertainty and insecurity. In white supremacist patriarchal structures, models of toxic masculinity prevent people expressing sensitivity or anxiousness: what if your worrying makes you look like a fool because all of it was “overreacting” or a prank you fell for? Preventing people expressing vulnerability is destructive to all.
There are also less damning possibilities for interpretation. In the already mentioned Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Becky (Dana Wynter) gets suspicious pretty quickly and voices her worries to Miles (Kevin McCarthy) who tries to reassure her that nothing is wrong. But then we hear in voice-over that Miles actually is scared, and feels it’s important to maintain a facade of confidence in front of Becky. The film seems to acknowledge that the “I’m sure it’s nothing” is performative. Miles feels a responsibility to keep others calm and thus he has to suffer alone in his suspicions.
Figure 3: Miles is flirting with Becky about kissing in dark hallways just after he has revealed being scared in voice-over in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
This still isn’t a very satisfactory way to react to the situation. Gaslighting another adult about what is going on is not ok. And why is Miles convinced that Becky couldn’t handle the truth? Also, why is it Miles’ responsibility not just to fix things but also to carry all the weight of the worrying? Trying to convince someone that there’s nothing to worry about is not kindness. It is a way to undermine their confidence in their feelings and instincts, and in horror films it also puts them in danger.
In recent years more films have started to address this trope more explicitly, in addition to Get Out, for example, The Invisible Man (2020) and Barbarian (2022) have garnered attention from this perspective (Finn 2023; Jacobs 2020). Emily Schoeff (2023) in her article on recent feminist horror stories seems to imply that the theme of believing or disbelieving women is an integral part of the subject matter of “elevated” horror. I would argue that the theme can be found in films like Friday the 13th and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even though the film makers or most of their audience haven’t been particularly conscious about it. And while I welcome more explicit handlings of the dynamics of believability, I bristle at the implied dichotomy that some stories simply challenge the status quo while others uphold it.
The horror in horror films isn’t just the monster, it’s also how differently people interpret what’s around them. Often to me the most chilling thing in a story is how some characters try to convince others that their experiences of what is happening are not valid: someone saying you’re overreacting or being too emotional or implying that being scared somehow makes you weak and stupid. Critics of the trope posit that it serves to convince viewers that these people should in fact be doubted, but I also think that the isolation the sensitive characters are feeling when they are doubted depicts the everyday experiences of many people. To me it’s comforting and validating to see again and again how the intuitive and sensitive character was right, even though they weren’t believed at the time. And I find it fascinating how consistent this representation has been. I think it is worth emphasizing that in horror films the sensitive and suspicious characters end up being right – and it’s also worth pondering why so many of our horror stories depend on not listening to them.
Works cited
Cheung, Kylie. “Sexist Disbelief Is Taking Over the Horror Genre.” Jezebel, 2022.
Dorley, Brianna. “The Aesthetics of Fear: Dissecting the Roots and Rage of Modern Black Horror.” Collider, 2021.
Finn, Lesley. “Rate Your Hunch: Women and Intuition in Barbarian.” Bright Lights, 2023.
Friday the 13th. Directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Georgetown Productions Inc, 1980.
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, Blumhouse Productions, 2017.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel, Walter Wanger Productions, 1956.
Jacobs, Matthew. “Why No One In Horror Movies Believe the Female Protagonist?” Huffpost, 2020.
Schoeff, Emily. “Can I Believe Her?: Fantastic Abjection in Contemporary Horror Narratives of Women.” The Macksey Journal 4 (48), 2023.
Kati Aakkonen is an essayist and a doctoral researcher at University of Jyväskylä in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Her writing usually revolves around nature, horror, gender and sexuality. Currently she is working on an essay collection and a scrap book project about strange, scary and sexy plants.
