If you know me, you know I love horror movies. Any good movie will effect you viscerally—comedies will make you laugh, romances will make your heart swell and break—but none of that compares to the way a good horror film shakes you to your core. Even bad ones follow you to bed at night and into your dreams. But that isn't what really makes horror films great. What keeps us coming back, decade after decade, weekend after weekend to see the fifth and sixth installments of these franchises, is the same thing that keeps us coming back to fairy tales—Virtue.

It's pretty easy to see the virtue in fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel disobey their father, and greedily chow down on a ginger bread house, and are punished for their indiscretion. Snow White is beautiful, in body and soul so her evil stepmother attempts to destroy her by appealing to that better nature, but Snow perseveres and things don't turn out too well for the stepmother. Hansel and Gretel behave badly, and are punished, and Snow White is virtuous and is rewarded.

It is a little less obvious when you look at horror films, but it is still there. To a very large extent they are about teenagers who drink and have sex, getting picked off one by one until only the most virtuous and virginal of them survive. I think it would be a little hypocritical of me to say I agree with that definition of virtue (let's just say I would have been killed very early and very gruesomely if my teenage life had been a horror story), but I do think it's obvious these films aren't just about finding new ways to pop out and say "boo!" They are about morality and the strength it has over the amoral—the power of virtue over evil.

Saying these genres are both about good defeating evil may not seem to differentiate them from the rest, but there is a nuance here that separates horror and fairy tales. They are not just about good defeating evil, they are about good defeating evil by being good. In horror films the teenager who makes it to the end isn't the one who knows karate, or the one who has an arsenal in his basement, it is the one who is the most virtuous. Same with fairy tales. Snow White's evil stepmother had magic and poison on her side while all Snow White had was a pure heart, yet she still won.

This may seem rather simplistic, I think that's one reason horror films don't win a lot of awards these days, and that criticism is fair. Today we want heroes who are gritty and flawed. They are more interesting that way, because they are more realistic. We are gritty and flawed, so we can relate to them. Batman is always more interesting than Superman.

Still, there is something to be said for the pure hearted hero. It may be simple, and it may be unrealistic, but it will always speak to us, because it tells us what we want to hear. It tells us that evil only has power over those who allow themselves to be seduced by evil and you need nothing more than a virtuous soul to keep you safe from harm. We want to believe that, and horror films and fairy tales reinforce the idea in pretty exciting ways. So whether it be Snow White or some well endowed co-ed, we want to see them persevere, because—really—we want to believe in the power of virtue over evil. Now if that's not a great basis for a story, I don't know what is.