Many successful horror movies are reflective of situations that could happen in real life. “Psycho,” for example, was based off of the idea of serial killers that appear as everyday people. In retrospect, one of the grandest horrors of our time reflected aspects of horror movies. On the morning of 9/11, Americans found themselves thrown into a horror movie and no one knew how it was going to end.
The first goal of any horror movie is to suspend disbelief so that the audience can have an opportunity to believe in the plausibility of what they are seeing. What was interesting was that it took hours for us to suspend disbelief while watching the coverage on TV or looking out our windows to what was going on in our area (New York residents). I can think of a dozen famous pictures that showed the crowd outside of the Twin Towers standing there with mouths covered and a look of disbelief on every face. While watching horror movies, we have trained ourselves to allow our disbelief to be suspended. When 9/11 happened, our psyches reversed and sustained disbelief in an attempt to save us from reality.
Many memorable horror movies deal with an unseen menace. “The Exorcist” and “Poltergeist” deal with entities that we cannot see. The fact that we cannot put a face to the horror scares us on a deeper level as we are creatures that learn from what we see. On 9/11 we could see the actions of the menace, but could not put a face to the enemy. Even once we learned the name of Osama bin Laden, the face or terrorism was the greatest unseen menace since Communism. Our enemy was not simply a person like Hitler; it was an ideal of putting hatred into action.
At the end of horror movies, we often will see a female that has been able to survive the horrors that took down so many. That female is a character that has stood up to the antagonist and has figured out the weak spot that no one figured out. She might be covered in blood, but has the tenacity to last through several more movies. On 9/11, that “final girl” was Lady Liberty standing in the harbor as the smoke billowed behind her. She still stands there today, and will continue to stand there for many years, and through many more horrors. By continuing to stand as she had, Lady Liberty found out what the terrorist’s weak spot was.