A necessary step?

Ask your standard Joe on the street what horror is sometime. I'm willing to bet that A: He or she gives examples rather than a definition, and B: Most of those examples are movies, and they include things like Dracula, Friday the Thirteenth, and Halloween, if they're my age. If they're not, well, hopefully it's American Horror Story or even Paranormal Activity. Just please not Twilight, because it really isn't horror.

Now I need to veer a bit to one side here. Hold on to the rail, please. While I'm distrustful of those who say one genre or another has a 'purpose' or function,' I do think that some types of fiction (printed or filmed) have effects on people. One effect that horror can have, depending on how your head is wired, is to help you deal with the 'real' things that you're afraid of. You watch Roddy McDowall triumph over a murderous, psychotic ghost, then you don't think having to ask your grouchy boss for some vacation time is as bad as you thought it could be. A girl survives (mostly) an encounter with a crazed family who kill all her friends with meathooks and chainsaws, so you can survive doing your taxes. A young doctor finds his true love and saves her from the vampirous reincarnation of her distant ancestor, so I can get over the disappointment of rejection and send more of my work out. We can tell all those motivational gurus that they're full of it, but those poor fools whose only sin was to take a wrong turn? Heck, that was us just last week.

Now here's my question, how far off the path of reality do we need to go? With the success of the Saw and Hostel series of movies, I'd be hard pressed to say that those films don't offer their audiences something. But I wonder if it's the same as the ones with a supernatural element. I know that there's nothing overtly supernatural in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so maybe my second example isn't the best, but the sheer craziness of the Leatherface family keeps it from being torture porn. Even one of my favorite directors, Takashi Miike, filmed 'Audition,' and had a cameo in one of the Hostel movies (brief tangent, I saw Audition, and it creeped me out like nothing else since when I saw Night of the Living Dead, at about age ten).

Does it make the horror easier to deal with, if it's about something unreal? I'm not going to address people's beliefs on ghosts, etc here, because for this discussion it isn't rellevant. Do we come away better armored for having watched The Exorcist, or The Last House on the Left?

What, you think I know? I'm asking the question. What's your answer?

Sadly, the bit in the second paragraph about rejection is true to life. Amazon shot down Roja based on the pitch alone, and Gray Matter Press declined on Dirty. Oh well.

I'm still writing.