We recently decided to watch Jurassic Park again.  When I was younger, I often wondered why Stephen Spielberg was passed over for academy awards.  His movies always seem to be popular and they’re well made.  I think now that I’m starting to get a better sense of the subtleties that award juries use.  In any case, Jurassic Park still holds up remarkably well.  The reason I raise it here, however, is that I was wondering if it could be considered a horror movie.  Casting about for weekend viewing, I see that various streaming services list the available Jurassic franchise films as horror.  And there are certainly horror elements to the original.  Dinosaurs in a modern setting have been used as a horror formula before, and a PG rating isn’t sufficient to disqualify a film as horror.  Is Jurassic Park horror?

It certainly has the Frankensteinian mad scientist element.  The decision to clone dinosaurs without sufficient consideration of how they might interact with/destroy modern humans and ecosystems has horror undertones.  More directly, a t-rex, and in the movie, velociraptors, are portrayed as monsters.  Don’t dinosaurs qualify as monsters, almost by definition?  The scenes of them stalking and pursuing kids, as well as adults, and the fear reaction shots suggest we’re going for the horror aspect of movies.  The film includes dismemberment, dark corners, and screams.  Typically it’s considered an adventure film, or science fiction.  The science in it, however, isn’t too far advanced from where things stood in the nineties.  Horror is a genre with indistinct borders.  Even as an adult who’s seen it several times, Jurassic Park still scares me.

The point of horror need not be to scare, of course.  I keep coming back to Edgar Allan Poe’s idea of effect.  It’s mood that makes horror, in my opinion.  One of those moods may be fear, but it isn’t necessarily the main, or even primary effect sought.  Believability is another of the moods.  I’m sure we’ve all seen movies that we simply can’t accept and that makes them less of whatever genre they happen to be.  Jurassic Park, apart from the usual leaps in any speculative story, is believable.  People do try to game the system.  As both the internet and AI teach us, people do release untested inventions on the public, sometimes with tragic results.  And while cloning remains controversial, is it difficult to believe that there might be scientists somewhere who wouldn’t love to clone dinosaurs, if they could actually get viable DNA?  To me this all says horror.