Fight Club: Not everything has to go in a box

The biggest influence on the way I watch and enjoy films has always been Empire magazine. For many years, I automatically watched everything that got the full five-star reviews (we've had some major differences of opinion in the past few years), and have an almost complete collection of the British movie mag, dating back to 1993

Indulging in a monthly dose of cinephilia like this leads to a slow accumulation of knowledge and feelings about every fucking thing in the world of movies. But sometimes, sometimes I'll read something in it that is a kick to the face.

It might be a piercingly accurate comment about modern life lurking in a review of a goddamn Friends boxset or it might be passion for the films of Satyajit Ray that makes me realise how limited my movie perceptions were.

And then there was the time they classified Fight Club as a horror film, and I immediately stopped giving a shit how any movie was classified.

Back around the turn of the century, the magazine published a whole bunch of excellent specials full of tiny essays honouring the best of films, each one centered around a certain genre. And when the horror one came along, it was all the usual suspects - The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw, etc etc - with a few small surprises, and one real head-scratcher in seeing Fight Club in there.

It had only been out for a few years at that stage, and I was still thinking of it as some weird dark comedy more than anything maybe a drama if you wanted ot get all serious on it. But the essay for Fight Club - written by Kim Newman, of course - argued that the revelation about Tyler Durden proved that it was actually a classic Jekyll and Hyde story, which is about as horror as it gets. 

That's a point that could certainly be argued further, but reading that justification made me instantly realise how much it didn't matter.  It poked a massive hole in my ideas that everything should go in the right box, everything needed to be labelled

Growing up as a genre head obsessed with science fiction and horror and all that shit, the idea that everything needed to be categorised was just the way it was, and an idea that was fostered by the entire film business, right down to the  local video stores, which just had to keep the thousands of titles they had in stock in some kind of order.

But it doesn't really matter if you can't stick a label on something ,or if you call Fight Club a horror movie. But now those kinds of arguments are all over the internet, and it's just as boring as it was 20 years ago. It doesn't have to be like that. It never does.

I still don't think Fight Club is a horror. Not really. But it just doesn't fucking matter.