If you stick around here for a while, you’ll see that I am frequently very concerned with categorizing things. I semi-jokingly refer to myself as a “literary taxonomist” because I find it interesting to trace the lineage of tropes and see where different works fall on the family tree. Because all work is in conversation with everything else.

So when I say that I’m interested in the question, “What makes a horror story, well, horror” I’m not approaching it from a gatekeeper perspective. I am genuinely curious whether there are lines that can be drawn around genres and what conclusions we can draw from works that fall on either side of a fuzzy barrier.

Which is why I think that Jurassic Park and Jurassic World make such an interesting side-by-side comparison.

read more: https://tlbodine.substack.com/p/what-is-a-horror-movie-anyway