One of my favorite speeches from a romantic comedy: “Maybe that whole love thing is just a grown-up version of Santa Claus, just a myth we’ve been fed since childhood. So we keep buying magazines, joining clubs, and doing therapy and watching movies with hit pop songs played over love montages, all in a pathetic attempt to explain why our love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney.”

The film is Kate & Leopold. I’m not very fond of Meg Ryan, but I am fond of romantic comedies. You wouldn’t peg me the sappy type, with my being a hardcore cynic and horror-phile, but I sometimes dig the fantasy of romance flicks.

Horror and romance aren’t all that different. Both exploit the viewer’s emotions; both use emotion against the viewer to force identification with the characters and events. When an axe murderer kills a nubile young woman on screen, we react with fear (or amusement, based on the quality of the flick) because we fear death—and psychopaths with sharp/blunt objects. When a down-on-his-luck Lloyd Dobler charms a nubile young woman on screen, we react with sympathy because, hell, we want to feel the endorphin rush those characters feel. We want to be in the rapture of love or, at the very least, to believe that rapture can exist. It’s pathos, fiction’s greatest trick, hard at work.

We identify with the sappy stuff because it’s separate from this often-cesspool we live in. Life isn’t a romantic comedy, not even a bad one. The movies tend to end once the two leads overcome the obstacles separating them and unite as a couple. But fairy tales end fast. Arguments, infidelity, and conflicts in life plans send storybook romances to the furnace o’ life.

The magic doesn’t last forever. Relationships have a success/fail ratio of 1/999,999,999. Finding genuine love and managing to keep it is like winning the lottery … twice. In the romantic comedy, we get to fall in love in 90 minutes. We don’t get to enjoy any, ahem, ‘figurative icing off of the metaphorical cake,’ but we do get to escape into a better world than this one, where the story ends when the relationship begins.

We need lies. Another great line from a romantic comedy: “It’s trying to live up to the lies we tell about ourselves that makes us better people.” This one’s not standard fare. Bobcat Goldthwait’s Sleeping Dogs Lie is about a woman who fellates a dog in college and how the revelation of the act destroys key relationships in her life. It goes beyond the genre boundaries and addresses some big issues such as the importance of honesty versus personal integrity.

Zombie Honeymoon is an honest-to-god love story about a flesh-eating zombie and the woman who loves him. Its conclusion somehow surpasses the black humor of the situation and manages a touching, emphatic ending.

Like other modes of fiction, romantic comedies are getting the postmodern treatment. When Reese Witherspoon, Meg Ryan, or Patrick Dempsey aren’t headlining a by-the-numbers rom-com, we’re seeing the genre flex some newly developed muscles. Even when they’re formula, these flicks are tapping something innate. There’s a little bit of Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd (Someone Like You) in all of us.

Either that, or I’m just deluded and am making excuses for enjoying films that are inappropriate for someone of my age and sex. But that’s just silly.

Charles Smith is a native of Southwest Virginia and is sensitive beyond his rugged, leading-man good looks. He has feelings, ya know.