#1

Frankenstein's Monster.  Now there's a bad idea.  And the moral involves the supreme sacrilege of pretension to godhood.  Not merely the typical childish fantasy of controlling another person heart and mind, but to bring one into being.  To be the father of a new Adam, to reign over a scientific Utopia for which the founder will surely be praised as no other man.  Though brilliant in regard to human physiology, and apparently possessing the secret to creating sentient life, Victor Frankenstein was no doctor of psychology.  He didn't anticipate the dangers of free will and primitive emotions.  Indeed, he didn't seem to give any thought to what would follow his shining achievement beyond the eternal praise of the scientific community and maybe the humiliation of his hated professors back in medical school.  What came of his blasphemous conceit was the immediate realization that he'd erred, if not just how at first.  This grotesque being sculpted from flesh and reanimated, his monster, was obviously not supposed to be distressed by the violent process of rebirth, not supposed to be enraged at the sight of his own horrid appearance.  Frankenstein must have expected the creature to be lucid, compliant and perhaps even grateful for this perverse retrieval from oblivion.  Instead, the creature proves to be the creator's doom.  He had sinned and conjured his own punishment from vengeful, unyielding dead flesh.  But it didn't have to go that way, did it?

Consider the story of Pinocchio.  A wooden puppet is brought to life and, even knowing that he is simply a ridiculous toy given a soul to keep a lonely, old toymaker company, he doesn't lash out at this strange parent or seek his destruction.  There is no moral in the story implying that magically giving life to a puppet in such a way that instills an insatiable desire within it to be a "real" boy instead of a miserable plaything is a bad idea inclined toward tragic consequences.  The stories seem to run counter to each other.  One story is meant to terrify, the other to delight and inspire.

So bad ideas can be seen as an important element of horror, or at least most horror.  Not just the bad ideas you see in television sitcoms that lead to humorous misunderstanding ultimately rectified without the loss of anyone's life and limbs, but bad ideas on the scale of existential threat that may or may not be resolved after a tremendous death-toll is incurred.  That threat isn't always the product of an error, but bad ideas aren't always unintentional.  A monster that is simply a force of nature, like the shark in Jaws, isn't the bad idea that comprises the moral, it's the decision of the local officials not to close the beach in a timely manner.  But though the decision is rooted in greed, this learned moral is only an aspect of the story, not the core of it.

Dracula doesn't lend itself to this sort of bad idea, either, unless you like Coppola's version, in which Dracula is cursed for blaspheming God.  But Dracula's idea of moving to London proves to be bad for his future victims.  And Dracula might have gone on existing if he hadn't had the bad luck of choosing Dr. Seward's love interest Lucy as a source of nourishment, since it was Seward who sends for Abraham Van Helsing.  But there's hardly a moral to be found there.  So the story doesn't really hinge on bad ideas at all.

In atomic-horror science fiction of the 1950s, giant insects were often the punishment for man's idea of splitting the atom.  Yet the premise wasn't exactly that we shouldn't have split the atom.  After all, at this point it was too late to un-split the atom and in in the end it's scientists of the same sort who unleashed the nuclear genie who are humankind's last line of defense against the atomic monsters.  The bad idea is there, but it seems hopeless for us to learn from it.  Bad ideas in horror movies are addressed, but nothing so serious as a moral is necessary.

The art of moviemaking itself is paralleled here.  Sometimes an idea for a move that isn't necessarily bad on it's face produces a movie which really is just bad.  Yet a bad movie that is done cheaply, if it turns out bad, could still return a profit for the unscrupulous filmmakers.  Looking for "the moral" in life can be maddening, so the principle isn't always appropriate for the more subversive appeal of typical horror movies.  The horror movie only needs a bad idea as an impetus for the story, something to aim the storyline toward terror, with any concluding moral lesson left entirely to the viewer's personal sensibilities.  Human suffering evolves from some bad idea, as is generally the case in real life, yet we are entertained by it.  We are free to enjoy this strange catharsis without the obligation of being wiser for the experience.  Even when we learn from history, the collective will isn't there to keep history from repeating itself, even though we're told learning history is a sure-fire means of of doing so.

Thus, bad ideas, being integral to human nature and quite unavoidable, are ultimately the champion.  It's not the lesson we extract from the bad idea, but the inspiration of seeing that idea confronted by the forces of virtue, whether victorious in the end or not.  It is each of us, heroically struggling against our own irrational fears.  As conflict is the recipe for drama, the struggle of sunshine versus darkness, remedy versus blight, is what makes horror moral, as well as making it palatable.

 

Unless you're just some kind of sicko...