What is the difference between an action movie and a horror movie?
They both involve peril, violence, and literal life-and-death stakes. They can involve very similar conceits–characters trapped in a location with something bad, for example. They can both be spectacularly bloody, or not. Like several of their genre cousins, including the survival, war, and even sports film, they can be ways of vicariously exploring our relationship to violence. Like the last survivor in a horror flick, the action hero must undergo a series of physical tests, often including capture and suffering at the hands of the film’s antagonist. So other than marketing, what makes us code Die Hard as action and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as horror?
Carol Clover posits an interesting idea in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. She argues that the key difference between an action movie and a horror movie is the amount of time the protagonist spends in a position of vulnerability versus a position of power.
If you imagine a graphical representation of this, it might look something like this:
An action movie is basically an extended demonstration of the main character’s physical prowess in the face of increasingly difficult challenges. There might be peril–especially at key moments like the midpoint and the end of the second act–and a protagonist might find themselves in a position of extreme vulnerability for a scene or even a sequence, but we’re basically confident in their physical and mental integrity in the face of danger. That’s why they’re the hero–by definition, that’s the reason our camera is watching this person and not Bystander Running From Aliens #1.
A horror movie, by contrast, looks something like this:
Horror movies are all about vulnerability. Horror characters spend almost the entire movie wallowing around “below the line,” in that soup of pain and terror near the vulnerability end of the axis. If the movie has a “final girl” or other lone survivor, they spend most of the film in a state of victimization. It’s only in the third act (or sometimes only in the very last sequence) that they’re able to fight back and claw their way into a position of power vis a vis the monster of the film, eventually escaping and/or killing their tormentor.
Clover argues that this is the appeal of horror. The vicarious experience of extreme vulnerability, through our identification with the victim-hero protagonist, is interesting to us, even if we consciously identify it as uncomfortable.
She also argues that this basic division is part of what gives these genres their gender patterns. Action, on the “power” end of the spectrum, is still primarily the domain of the male hero. It is also predominantly the domain of the professional violence worker protagonist (state-sponsored or freelance): cops, soldiers, assassins, vigilantes, spies–people for whom there is a social expectation of being somewhat good at violence.
Horror, on the “vulnerability” end of the spectrum, is one of the few genres where the female protagonist is so common the trope has a name–the “final girl.” It’s also a genre in which ordinary-person protagonists are the norm. Horror protagonists are all guerrilla warriors–they fight back with whatever they can find, to the best of their abilities, sometimes with nothing more than household objects and chutzpah.
And while there is certainly a minority tradition of female action heroes, from Sarah Connor to Katniss Everdeen, I’m hard-pressed to think of a similar list of “final boys,” in the way that Clover uses the term for a character who is allowed to be “abject terror personified.” The horror genre is huge, so they certainly exist, but not at the level of pop-cultural saturation of Halloween’s Laurie or Nightmare on Elm Street’s Nancy. Perhaps male vulnerability and terror still rattles the cage of gender norms more than female power.
The point of this is not to say that horror is better than action, or vice versa, or to posit that these are hard-and-fast distinctions. Genre should be thought of as a continuum, not a set of discrete categories. (So should gender, for that matter.) This is all further complicated by the fact that “action” is both an element and a genre descriptor. (The Silence of the Lambs and Heat would both be described as crime thrillers by genre; one has almost no action while the other has a lot.)
That being said, I do have an interest in what we can learn from that genre that’s considered the lowest of low culture. I think how much you like horror has a lot to do with how interesting you find the vulnerability side of the scale. I find it very interesting. In fact, I think watching someone be vulnerable is about one of the most interesting things you can watch on screen–and watching someone be vulnerable and then realize they are powerful is even better. Of course, there are a lot of examples of this outside the horror genre–Bridesmaids is full of vulnerability, and that’s what makes it so funny. But in horror, we have a whole genre whose raison d'etre is vulnerability, and I think there’s a lot worth studying there for moviegoers and filmmakers of all genres.
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