I agree very strongly (well, except for the part about horror movies being a guilty pleasure; a great movie is a great movie, regardless of genre). Some of my favorite horror flicks certainly have a heavy gore content, whether they’re using it to create a genuinely disturbing effect (as in a Cronenberg movie, for example) or just for shocking fun (Re-Animator leaps to mind). But just as many – if not more – of my favorites rely instead on suggestion and atmosphere; the original The Haunting leaps to mind, one of the scariest movies ever, in which very little horrifying content is ever actually shown. Horror is a genre which takes a rich variety of forms – a much wider variety than most non-fans have any conception of. Its basic remit is to disturb, or to address that which is disturbing, which it can do by being scary (though being scary is certainly not a fundamental requirement of being horrifying), by being disgusting, by being shocking, or by simply raising unsettling notions. It’s a genre that has room for movies like I Walked with Zombie and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to stand side-by-side with movies like Twitch of the Death Nerve and Evil Dead II.
