Why do we like horror?

It doesn't seem to make sense. What is the appeal in subjecting ourselves to disgust, loathing, apprehension and, most particularly, fear? Isn't it contrary to our most fundamental human instincts that put pleasure as our highest priority? Don't we want to feel good, not bad?

Clearly, we don't. At least, we don't want to feel just good. Unmitigated pleasure is more than simply boring, it is anti-life. Imagine having a switch like Larry Niven's wireheads which allows you to inhabit a moment of intense pleasure forever, or at least until you die from self neglect. Consider our response to drugs which envelop us in a joy so addictive that we forget about eating, about sex, about friendships and simply pursue the drug state even if it kills us. What is our reaction to hedonists who eschew responsibility, consequences, ethics? Don't we consider all of these missing something essential to life?

Pleasure only has potency when it is coupled with unpleasure. So, is pleasure intensified when we deepen the sensations of unpleasure? Possibly. But that suggests a binary nature to pleasure/unpleasure that simply doesn't exist. One isn't on because the other is off. Fear and desire, lust and disgust, love and hate often occur simultaneously.

Herein lies one of the more intriguing aspects of horror as a genre. What's your preference? Do you like action movies? Detective stories? Romantic comedies? Do any of these attract the sort of visceral judgements put on horror? Does anyone suggest that you are 'sick' because you like historical adventures?

We all have our different individual emotional chemistry. Horror comes in a multiplicity of forms and each have their afficionados. For me, slasher and splatter horror don't really create that satisfying tension between pleasure and unpleasure. Torture porn neither. Zombies don't do it, nor monsters generally (Alien being a notable exception). But I vividly remember as a rather-too-young teen reading The Exorcist late into the night and reaching the moment when Regan, having murdered the foul-mouthed Burke Dennings, turns her head backwards and says in his voice to her mother, 'Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?' That moment in the novel is electrifying and the most shocking and celebrated in the film. The sense of defilement is overwhelming. Here is a child taking on the awareness of a debased and degraded adult and delighting in the evil of his death and her own corruption. It is spine-chilling and, at the same time, utterly thrilling.

That synchronicity of pleasure and unpleasure is what gives horror its power and psychological impact. The internet is full of theories about the attraction of horror (there's a pretty good overview here). Desire to cathartically face our fears? Need for predominantly male viewers to participate in a social display of bravery? Primeval motivation to experience extreme danger by proxy? Dopamine receptors in the brain? Sure, maybe. But none of these persuade me of the compelling appeal of horror.

Part of the answer for me might lie in Freud's notion of the uncanny. In German, that's 'unheimlich'. 'Heimlich' means 'secret', 'hidden', 'private' and has an additional, less common meaning of 'familiar' and 'agreeable'. The 'unheimlich' is therefore the exposure of social taboos with all their attendant threat and sense of abomination as well as our own individual forbidden (and hence repressed) desires.

Low budget is not high budget on a shoestring

People make low budget feature films for two reasons: as a stepping stone to making higher budget films, and/or for the freedom of expression that lo-bo allows. Of course, 'freedom' depends on how you look at it. Lo-bo operates within obvious constraints but so do financed films, mostly to do with justifying or recouping investors' money. And in both cases, these restrictions aren't necessarily the death of creativity but the wellspring. Even so, vast resources and endless technical capability can make film-makers lazy. Where is the ingenuity of Georges Melies, or the subtle off-screen suggestiveness of Fritz Lang or Hitchcock? Lo-bo demands their inventiveness and relies upon a more idiosyncratic form of cinematic narrative.

My director buddy Ian Dixon and I have a long relationship that goes back to high school in the 80s. Over the years, we have collaborated on four main projects - 3 theatre plays as part of a collective in the mid-nineties, and a half-hour film for SBS at the beginning of the 2000s. There is no doubt that our film ambitions have been focused on traditionally financed projects but we both have a genuine love of lo-bo and its possibilities. Last year, Ian introduced me to Stephen Cleary, whose astute understanding of what makes lo-bo unique in its conception and development was eye-opening to both of us.

Stephen's view is that lo-bo films do not tell stories that financed films could tell better. They tell stories that can only be told within the parameters of lo-bo's freedoms and constraints. An example is 52 Tuesdays, shot on one day a week for a year.

The idea for The Perimeter germinated in a few weeks workshopping with Stephen at the end of 2013. His crucial suggestion that lo-bo starts not with an idea but with your available assets - out of which you construct an idea - in effect set us to reverse-engineer a story to suit the actors and locations and shooting possibilities that we already had access to.

We built our story on two critical assets: Ian's house in the Dandenongs and his new baby daughter.

Now, maybe horror isn't where everyone would have ended up with a gorgeous innocent baby as your central figure, but we did. Maybe we watched Eraserhead too many times back in the 80s. I have two daughters who are now no longer babies and, while occasionally horrible (mostly to each other), they are not in any way horrific. In the end, we also added another older child to the story in the belief that we knew enough children between my own and those of friends to cast that role. Oh and we put in a dog. Because Ian has a dog.

So, we've found ourselves with a project that works mainly with children and animals (thank you WC Fields) in a genre that throws up all sorts of tricky welfare issues for these young people, whom we don't intend to expose to the sort of disturbing content that the film will ultimately expose our adult audience to. Doing it with no money is starting to look like the easy bit.