Studying the Philosophy of Horror gave me an insight on how horror is identified and why we as humans, although we are repulsed by the unpleasant and disgusting, we still go back and oddly enjoy it. Ideas for the horror genre stem from everyday life experiences, and things that happen in the real world. Some are taken right out of the real world and others are a bit exaggerated. Going back to the roots of the genre, we should think of "What invokes evil and horror in real life?"

Evil is "intentionally behaving -- or causing others to act – in ways that demean, dehumanize, harm, destroy, or kill innocent people." I believe that evil in humans is invoked by no one else but their own kind. The power of social situations to alter the mental representations and behavior of individuals, and/or groups is under-recognized. We live in a world cloaked in the evils of civil and international wars, terrorism, homicides, rapes, abuse, and many more forms of devastation. "The same human mind that creates the most beautiful works of art and extraordinary marvels of technology is equally responsible for the perversion of its own perfection."

The hunt for evil is usually focused on those marginalized people who look or act differently from ordinary people. But what causes an ordinary, "good" person to act in anti-social ways, and behave destructively toward the property or person of other people? Philip G. Zimbardo relates, "I have seen first hand my childhood friends go through behavioral transformations, and always wondered how and why they did, and whether I could also change like that. I was similarly fascinated with the behavioral transformation tale of Robert Louis Stevenson’s good Dr. Jekyll into the murderous Mr. Hyde. What was in his chemical formula that could have such an immediate and profound impact? But then even as a child, I wondered, were there other ways to induce such changes, since my friends did not have access to his elixir of evil before they did such bad things to other people."

There are many horror movies in which the character is invoked to act in an evil and horrendous way, like Carrie, Cat People, Frankenstein, Wrong Turn, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Saw to mention a few. Carrie is a story of a mousy and abused girl with telekinetic powers which she uses to harm people when she gets pushed too far. In Cat People, I believe that Irena was pushed to harm Alice because Oliver, Irena's husband, sought consolation with his colleague. Irena became jealous when she realized that she may be losing Oliver to Alice. Her jealousy led her to frighten Alice and try to harm her.

The movie Frankenstein, is centered on a monster and his struggle in the 'life after death' that he was forced to live. He was harmless but the way he was treated by the village people made him angry and led to his outbursts of rage. Wrong turn is about six people who find themselves trapped in the woods of West Virginia, hunted down by "cannibalistic mountain men grossly disfigured through generations of in-breeding." The Hills Have Eyes shares a plot with Wrong Turn and is about a suburban American family that is being stalked and attacked by a group of deformed psychotic cannibals, fruit of the atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by USA from 1945 to 1962, who live in the desert, far away from civilization. Absolutely trapped by the psychotics, they have to fight to survive. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is about a group of friends passing through the backwoods of Texas and are stalked and hunted down by a deformed killer with a chainsaw in order to sustain his poor family who can only afford to eat what they kill. These are "normal" people per se. But they are "different", which led the "normal" person to treat them unjustly, and to shun them. All they needed was a little understanding and love. Perhaps the evil in the "normal" person is what invokes evil and terror in the unfortunate ones.

Saw is centered on Jigsaw, a patient dying from an inoperable tumor that had developed from colon cancer. In the series, Jigsaw usually created deadly tests for his subjects. He claimed that he was attempting to help his victims survive with a better appreciation of life by jump starting their survival instincts by placing them in life-threatening situations. This man wasn't as fortunate as others and wasn't given the chance to live a full and happy life. His subjects were people he sees as wasting their lives and attempts to "save" them by administering various inhumane tests. As opposed to other killers, Jigsaw does not actually intend to kill his subjects. The purpose of his traps is to see if the subject has the will to survive, and thus inflict enough psychological trauma for the subject to appreciate their life and save themselves from their own demons.

We are not born with tendencies toward good or evil, but with capabilities to do either. Perhaps it is our vulnerability to situational forces that leads the way.