Why are We Afraid of Horror?
Updated: Aug 29
Horror is making a comeback. The recent revival of the genre in English‑language theater, after years in which it was considered outdated and anachronistic, echoes the same fears that gave rise, in the 19th century, to literary horror classics such as Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray: fears of scientific and technological innovation, “others” and outsiders, epidemics, and social changes perceived as a threat to the existing social order. But if the horror genre thrives when there is “collective anxiety,” it should also thrive in our theater now, shouldn’t it? Recently, it actually seemed like first buds were emerging: the success of the Sapir Prize winning novel “Bereavement and Failure and Zombies,” the production of television series such as “The Malevolent Bride,” “The Hammam” (filmed before the war), and “Notok,” and what about theater? In 2022 The Tzavta Short Theater Festival staged a program dedicated to original short horror plays, and we at "Kvutzat Avoda" theater group dared to stage the play "Welcome" by Noam Gil, which was taken off the stage after October 7th, because real-life horror made dealing with the genre much scarier. As someone who has flirted with the genre quite a bit over the past decade, and used its elements to tell the Israeli story on stage, I will try to answer the question: Why is Israeli theater afraid of horror plays, and if and how can we possibly overcome this fear?
I think I have a good answer, but fear is a bit of a scary subject, so I thought I'd do it slowly and gradually...
Here are 10 subgenres of horror, and the fears they reflect:
(*It is important to remember that all of these subgenres, can and should be mixed, or combined with other genres. So I will be making a technical separation between them for the sake of "orderly academic discussion" alone.)
The Horror Comedy
Dark comedy utilizes the same mechanisms of fear that appear in the other subgenres that we will detail below, but at the same time it invites the viewer to identify the genre's clichés, to be very aware of the manipulations and tricks it uses, and to laugh at our fears. In the Israeli context, comedic horror allows us to touch on heavy topics such as personal security, racism, gender violence, or collective fears, while maintaining a tone of “making fun of ourselves". Dark humor is a survival mechanism in a society saturated with anxiety, and Jewish humor, for example, was born from this survival need. It is possible to laugh about our greatest fears, as long as the audience understands the codes of irony as an artistic language, of saying one thing while meaning something else.
Noir/Dark Crime Thriller
Theatrical noir is the genre in which horror arises from the city and its moral darkness: a detective, journalist, or marginal character tries to solve a crime, but the closer they get to the truth, the more it becomes clear that the entire city is steeped in corruption. The threat is not just a lone murderer but the absence of any real possibility of justice. The mechanism of fear relies on atmosphere: low lighting, empty urban spaces, characters that appear and disappear, and language that blurs the line between cynicism and despair. In the Israeli context, noir connects to stories about power and capital, police violence, organized crime that infiltrates politics, and the experience of the ordinary citizen living in the city they love, knowing it is built on dark agreements that will never be fully revealed. In Israeli theater, plays like “The City” (Amit Ulman, Omer Havron, and Omer Mor) or “The Mysterious Disappearance of M.” (Danielle Cohen Levy) employ a style borrowed from another time and place to help us maintain a safe distance.
Supernatural Horror
Supernatural horror in theater is based on a temporary collapse of the rational: the laws of the world are maintained until the moment another force- a spirit, a possession, a curse- penetrates the dramatic system, undermining its basic intelligibility. Theatrical mediation emphasizes the tension between the agreed upon (“This is just a game”) and the physical experience of the viewer who reacts as if the threat were real. In the Jewish-Israeli context, adaptations inspired by “The Dybbuk” or variations on “The Golem” posit the horror not only in the physical survival of the characters, but in the question of who controls body and soul – God, the community, or a different impulse that refuses to converge within the halakhic and social framework.
Social/Political Horror
Okay, so far we've used humor, fantasy, and style to stay in the relatively safe zone of escapism, but if it scares us too much or hurts, we can always combine it a little with the previous subgenres, and call it satire. Socio-political horror focuses the horror gaze not on a single monster but on an entire social structure: state, army, police, corporation, social networks, or a closed community, which instead of protecting the individual turn out to be a source of threat. In such theater, the monster is the system, or the crowd. The mechanism of fear relies on a Kafkaesque sense of helplessness: even if the heroes act correctly, they really have no way of dismantling the mechanism of supervision and punishment. Socio-political horror in Israel is charged in contexts of military rule, bureaucracy, institutional violence, over-policing, and exclusion; The play can begin as a regular drama, and gradually slide into a world where the regulation, procedure, or order of the hour becomes a monster that determines who will live and who will disappear.
The Horror of Confined Time and Space
On our scale of fears, this is an almost everyday fear, especially now. The horror of measured time and enclosed space examines what happens when the outside is locked down, and the characters – along with the audience – are “stuck” in one place under the pressure of time. A room, a bomb shelter, an isolated base, an elevator, or even a dinner table can become a pressure device where the emotional temperature rises with the realization that there is no way out. The fear mechanism here is a combination of claustrophobia and deadline anxiety: from the moment the countdown begins, every silence and every look takes on extra weight. In Israel, where the experience of enclosed space and limited time is part of life, this subgenre allows a familiar experience – waiting – to be transformed into a terrifying nexus where the question is not necessarily whether I survive, but which “I” will emerge from the room once the door opens.
Trauma/Grief Horror
A subgenre focused not on the violent event itself but on its reverberations: on what happens after. The stage becomes a ghostly arena. Not of supernatural spirits but of memories, flashbacks and characters who fail to return to normal. The mechanism of fear here is the compulsive urge of trauma to return: the past is not “the past”, it is an active force that defines the present. In Israeli theater that deals with wars, terrorist attacks and captivity, the horror of trauma and mourning functions as a collective mirror: the viewer knows the events, sometimes personally, and the play returns them to him not as facts but as an ongoing nightmare in which the body and mind fail to reaccustom themselves to a world that is supposed to move on.
Psychological Thriller
A psychological thriller in theater brings to the stage the fragility of perception: the character – and sometimes the viewer too – can no longer distinguish between reality and imagination, between memory and fantasy, between interpretation and fact. The central mechanism of fear here is not an external “monster” but the despair of the possibility of truth: the inner gaze itself becomes a threat, the soul is the site of penetration. Theater, as a medium of living presence, exploits this fragility through partial credibility: an actor who “loses it” on stage, the disappearances and entrances of characters, an unfinished story – all of these place the viewer in a state of cognitive instability that generates anxiety. In Israeli psychological thrillers, this feeling is also fueled by familiar settings – rented apartments, housing units, marital and family relationships, illustrating how political and economic anxiety slips into the intimate space.
House of Horror
Spatial horror that focuses on the home raises the question of what constitutes a “safe space”: the home is presented as a fortress that protects the subject from external chaos until the moment when the outside intrudes, through the figure of an intruder, a neighbor, a relative or even an unexplained noise. The mechanism of horror here is the violation of the basic contract of private space: the room, the kitchen, the bed – spaces that are supposed to hold rest and privacy – become areas of threat. In the Israeli context, where the home is connected not only to the family but also to land, territory and physical security, intrusion into a home in horror theater brings together fears of personal security, gentrification, economic violence and betrayal within the family unit itself.
Body Horror
Here we are stepping into the realm of hardcore, trigger filled creation which is very rare to see on an Israeli stage, because the mechanism of fear utilized in this sort of work lies in dissolving the separation between the “self” and the “flesh”: what is presented on stage as decay, infection, or loss of physical control, corresponds with all of our anxieties about disease, old age, pain, dependency, and invasive medical technology. In the Israeli context, plays that depict war injuries, medical treatments, or disability can be interpreted as horror plays, but without introducing irony, humor, or other stylistic distance, it may be too much for us, when all we want is to disconnect from reality for a moment.
Slasher/ Serial Killer
Instead of creating a mythical and extreme creature, the slasher actually exacerbates the mundane: a kitchen knife, a suburban house, a party – all of these become a massacre scene, and it is precisely the material simplicity that gives the feeling of “this could happen to me too.” In theater, tangible violence will always remain symbolic and represented, but in the Israeli context, the slasher meets anxieties about violence within the family, gender violence, and political violence, so just the thought of the option of staging such a play here and now, without filters such as humor, fantasy, or style, answers the question we asked at the beginning: Why are we afraid to stage horror plays?
It's no coincidence that this genre thrives mainly in privileged countries like Britain, the US, South Korea, or Japan. It seems to me that in order to enjoy hardcore horror, the way one enjoys an extreme amusement park ride, one must know with confidence that even if the fear feels real for a moment, it is only an echo of an abstract and distant fear, and not a trigger for actual pain, which at best you have managed to suppress, and at worst is present all the time, even without this ride on the "demon train," which jumps up the adrenaline as darkness falls, the tension rises, and then with the help of music or a sudden sound effect, you go “Boo!” Just for fun.
On the contrary, the prosperity of the horror genre, in my opinion, actually indicates normality and a sense of personal security. In the window of time after the peace agreement with Egypt and before the First Lebanon War, the Cameri Theater staged "Sweeney Todd", and Levin's macabre plays: "The Torments of Job" and "Decapitation". In the early 1990s, for example, between the first intifada and the assassination of Rabin, when the audience experienced a narrow window of hope for normalcy, the biggest box office success in Israeli theater was the macabre comedy "Arsenic and Old Lace," and the artistic success was Levin's journey of horrors: "The Child Dreams." In late 2003, during the brief window of hope between the Second Intifada and the rise of Hamas in Gaza, the Cameri Theater dared to stage "The Woman in Black" with relative success, and I directed "Wait Until Dark," which was considered a great success in terms of The Library Theater (how fun it was to discover that you can give audiences a scare in the theater). In my opinion, original horror plays have never achieved commercial success here (with the possible exception of "The Dybbuk") because our "windows of normalcy" are probably too short for the development and production of a horror play. When we stage original Israeli horror in theater for fun, it is usually in the small halls of the fringe theater, and they are usually self-aware horror comedies or satirical variations on the genre, which often predict (with exaggerated success in my opinion) the realization of their creators' fears about the future of our society.
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