Some Casual (But Deadly Serious) Thoughts on Contemporary Horror Films

The Re-Return of the Repressed in Return of the Living Dead: NecropolisLast October in Asheville, North Carolina, I had the pleasure of attending a theatrical viewing of Saw II (2005) with a group of experts. Don Mancini (creator of the Child’s Play franchise), Barry Sandler (screenwriter), and Ken Hanke (genre scholar and critic) shared my distaste for the film, which I felt to be slightly hard to pin-down at first. Saw II was imaginative, stylish, and often displayed verve, yet left me sour. It was certainly a cutting-edge (puns aside) horror film, symptomatic of larger trends in the genre at large. Finally, after some discussion, we began to understand our mutual suspicions: films of this cycle delight in the minute, realistic depictions of pain and torture, now entirely possible due to advancements in effects technology (digital or manual). Whereas the greatest films of 1970s horror cinema transgressed towards social ends, this latest subgenre (“pain films”) seemed to remove or avoid marked political, moral, or artistic positions. Evil, sadism, and blood consumed the screen, sometimes without motivation or hope. How, when and where did the horror film lose its status as one of the most consistently socially conscious, probing genres?Though a complete survey of the genre is well beyond the confines of this article, it is well worth examining some of the widest interpretations of recent decades. Keep in mind that this account paints history in broad strokes, attempting to give meaning to dominant tendencies. The counter examples are numerous (keep in mind that these resisting films are often more interesting than the sculpted mascots of the era…i.e., the uncharacteristically absolute view of evil of The Exorcist [1973] and The Omen [1976] in the 1970s, or politically radical films such as The Stuff [1985] or Day of the Dead [1985] in the 1980s). Some combination of the dissolution of the MPAA’s dinosaur ratings system, the historical legacy of the art films of the 1950s/early 1960s, and the political radicalism of the worldwide events of 1968 (not to mention such lasting nuisances as the American involvement in Vietnam) set the stage for a new breed of horror film, one that transcended many of the conventions of the monster melodramas of Universal, the “well-made” prestige of early Hammer, and the un-ambitious camp of decades of “B” pictures. These films were made by intelligent, self-styled auteurs who brought the new permissiveness above mere exploitation. The major titles are well-known: Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978). Their texts, sub-texts, and ur-texts have been endlessly debated, but their persistence lingers. Generally speaking, the undercurrent of radicalism that lay beneath these films by Romero, Cohen, Hopper, and the others soon disappeared from the mainstream. Accounts of horror films in the 1980s focus on the newly established slasher/stalker/knife genre – these movies are often noted for their regressive tendencies, sexual puritancalism, and (as the shear number of titles out there attest), their endlessly repeated themes. The 1990s saw a maturation of many of the nascent loose ends of the previous decades. We got an acceleration of sequelization, diversified offerings for the direct-to-video market, and, largely because of the internet, the possibility for niche communities to resurrect the lost films of the past on a scale previously undreamed. Generic knowledge was the victor of the day, and it lapsed into the mainstream with two excellent films, both from Wes Craven: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) rescued the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise while Scream (1996) handed horror film sophistication to a whole new generation of moviegoers on a silver platter. The defacto hipness of the Scream series had wide influence, from direct descendents like Urban Legend (1998) to a new (and for many, unwelcome) breed of parody in the form of Scary Movie (2000).

Scream is now ten years old. Where are we now? It is debatable as to whether or not the film was read as meaningful in its contemporary setting (or, at least, in the right ways) in the first place. The following account of contemporary horror cinema is not strictly chronological, but rather organized by theme, cycle, or country of origin. It is obviously limited to the knowledge of one person who has not had a chance to see everything produced during the last 7 or 8 years. Two main things, as teased out above, can account for the currently wide accommodation for new horror films on the market. Perhaps most importantly, despite shifting modes of spectatorship (from mainly brick & mortar distribution to online and electronic, for one), the DVD market has swelled to critical mass. A now mature format, it boasts a large in-print library available to anyone with money. Rental systems like Netflix and its imitators follow the Amazon model of recommendations, tailoring possibilities to the individual viewer (and with billions of people in the world, many of them English speakers, the tastes are diverse). While box art used to be the lurid catalyst for rental in the earlier days of video, peer reviews now accompany selections. Outside of this market, which accommodates most horror in the low-to-mid budget range, Hollywood and other independent distributors have continued to feed the demand for big screen terror. A large budget by horror film standards, around the $20 million marker, is the going salary for a star to appear in most Hollywood fare (these films are usually budgeted at five times our puny horror picture). Even the worst horror films can recoup their budget on their first domestic theatrical run, almost guaranteeing a profit after advertising and DVD production costs. While it is noble to imagine the continued persistence of the horror genre as a stalwart in the human endeavor to confront “the Other,” it is in fact, more often than not, an enabling factor. A few profitable horror films provide the capital for the all-or-nothing blockbuster.

Horror in the Age of Rap-Metal

Teenagers have always been staples in the horror genre. A large proportion of horror fandom began during the teenage years. These movies are sometimes envisioned as date fodder – how many children were conceived as a result of a fearful night at the cinema (It’s Alive [1973] notwithstanding)? Much was made of the slasher cycle’s instance on ritually slaughtering morally questionable youth in front of a mostly young audience. Not surprisingly, groups of people have always delighting in seeing the problems of their position represented by acting. The bourgeois chamber dramas of Ibsen incited interest and scandal for their bourgeois consumers. The American Worker’s Theatre movement of the late 19th century was an attempt on the working class to enact their concerns for themselves, on their own aesthetic terms. Horror films by people with teenage mindsets continue to be made for teenagers. This is not a bad thing, in the case of the intelligent, well-made examples. But fandom, misinterpretation, and production specifically or exclusively for teenagers has caused some problems.

The fans of yesteryear are the directors of today. After initial experiments by the craftsmen of the early studio and sound years, the idea of film authorship, of the single/guiding creator of a feature, leaked into the popular consciousness. Our beloved Movie Brat directors, but even many before, have modeled their careers and work on the output of the pioneering greats. Their artistic maturation is due in part to influence. For a while, horror fandom meant a specific attachment to the monsters and stories of “golden age” horror, chief among them the famous output of Universal. The people in fandom, their tastes and desires, change with the times. One of the consequences of increasingly common screen violence was a new breed of genre auteur, that of the special effects artist (Tom Savini is their chief). Ultra-violent experiments in Italian Horror films and their spawn created a new desire within horror genres – a need to show gore, splatter and blood purely for its own sake. For many in horror fandom, this becomes a consuming desire. For these fans, the best films are the bloodiest, or the ones that bring the most naturalistic and “accurate” portrayals of sensational bloodletting to the screen. Some of these fans became directors. So…

John Kenneth Muir once related an anecdote about writing for a popular, widely available genre publication. He inquired about doing a piece on a 25 year old TV show, an idea which was more or less squashed from the outset. This magazine only encouraged the discussion of films, shows, and music that an enthusiastic 16 year old would recognize.

New Horror as a Misrecognition of History

These two tensions – the personal fan history of a director, writer, or producer, combined with the pressures of making a product for the perpetual adolescent – are the main harbingers of the new horror ethos. After all, a recent article by Martin Barker, Ernest Mathijs, and Xavier Mendik from Film International called “Menstrual Monsters: The Reception of the Ginger Snaps Cult Horror Franchise” reminds us that meaning is made in that matrix between production, reception, and individual interpretation. My shorthand conjecture on persistent fandom and the demands of the market can be viewed as a theoretical counterpart to this methodology.

Uwe Boll and Paul Thomas Anderson make zombie pictures (House of the Dead [2003] and Resident Evil [2002], respectively), incorporating recent technologies, the latest pulse-pounding Rap-Metal soundtracks, and plentiful gore. In the process, their reading of history (Romero) somehow escapes his perpetual knack for social comment. This is to say nothing of their problematic stance toward the adaptation of video game matter, which is an investigation best left for another day. The horror genre is on the other side of the apex of maturity, so I would like to continue with one idea in mind: many of our recent generic developments are the result of a misreading (or, perhaps, a narrowly defined or blindside reading) of historical precedent. While horror films still cover the same basic ground and still employ a common set of techniques, they have changed in the capacities to render intelligible meanings.

“The Genre Mash – It was a Graveyard Smash”: The New American Horror Film

There have always been subgenres or subcycles within the horror film at large, but new variants have arrived with full force. Serial killer suspense merges with the slasher film, surreal psychodramas, postmodern musing in American Psycho [2000]. Every genre short of the musical mutates into the French film Brotherhood of the Wolf [2001]. Extreme action cinema from Asia becomes horror by virtue of its graphic excesses. As I outline later, The Ring Two [2005] shifts from being about technical anxiety to maternal melodrama with the bat of an eye. Though my friends probably grow tired of hearing about it, Fredric Jameson, in his theories of the postmodern, speaks of an age in which parody is no longer possible – pastiche, the confused or confusing combination of disparate elements from the culture at large, presents unintelligibility without irony. “Parody” movies like Scary Movie, Shriek if you Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th (2000), and the like degrade past self-parody, their safe, laughing vantage-point disintegrating underneath their feet.

The “pain” films of the last 7 years can count the Saw franchise and Hostel (2005) as their champions. In a recent roundtable discussion on Land of the Dead (2005) from Video Watchdog, Steve Bissettte called Hostel “a reactionary pandering to the worse conservative, xenophobic fears of the current generation.” I’m not sure how much these films have to say in the way of self-styled politics, but Saw II (2005) presents an interesting case-study in boxing-out broad social relevance. The film’s villain goes to unimaginable lengths to hermetically contain a group of people in a nerve wracking environment, which on its own terms exists only to endeavor ever-more arcane and gut-wrenching ways to inflict damage on living tissue.

Some of the old standbys are fading. The Jeepers Creepers series locates the mythic monster tale in the horror sphere without lapsing into hard sci-fi. Slither (2006), a real standout of late, is a visceral monster comedy with zombie cycle elements. Ghost stories, haunted houses, and lightly supernatural or paranormal movies persist, though not in incredibly large numbers.

The remake continues to swing, now plundering work from the 1970s and later. By 2020, all of Romero’s films will have been remade (including the recent Land of the Dead). Recently, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2004) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006) were remade with contemporary verve, though with less revolutionary significance than their originals. Even the state of such criticisms is impoverished: we don’t think about the new Dawn of the Dead (2004) in terms of what (if anything) it can teach us about our contemporary world-situation, but rather argue about the pros and cons of running zombies (for the record, I’m pro in moderation, but only the proper context). As I said, remakes have long been a part of the American film industry, but the contemporary trend presents an opportunity to see how films known for their timely, contextual social value work in wholly different situations.

The International Scene: J- Horror

A somewhat recent site of much discussion within the horror world is centered on the triumph of a new kind of Japanese horror cinema. Grounded in a strong tradition of ghost stories, yet having the distinction of being the only nation to have been victim to an atomic bomb, Japanese cinema rides on extremes. The elegiac, reserved films of Yasujiro Ozu are from the same national tradition of the New Wave action of Seijin Suzuki, a thriving world of blue/pink erotic films, and the recent agitator Takashi Miike. In the post-war years, America regarded Japan paternalistically, but in the 1980s feared its technological might. Popular culture in the U.S. soon eagerly welcomed Anime, a rich and peculiar tradition of Japanese comic artistry. From that, the American otaku (roughly, dedicated hobbyist) was born. A love of Anime is no longer a peripheral obsession.

For many, a love of one aspect of Japanese popular culture yields others, which partially explains why horror films like Ringu became so popular, so quickly. Yet, our film industry was not able to leave well enough alone – we made our own versions of The Ring (2002) and The Grudge (2004) (from Ju-On [2003]).

Found in Translation? A Brief Look at The Ring Two

Mommy dearest: the pratfalls of parenting in The Ring TwoI recently watched The Ring Two, which in many ways is a peculiarly American take on a Japanese precedent. The story arc of the Ring/Ringu series is not particularly original. The films tell us that what we watch is bad for us, which Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) did 15 years earlier on a much larger scale, and that montage (in this case, quickly interwoven images, often of apparently unrelated images, projected with considerable speed) is scary, which Vertov and Eisenstein pretty much verified 70 years ago. The Ring Two picks up where The Ring left off, but as becomes readily apparent, the original problem has not gone away. This film is based on its Japanese counterpart, yet was rewritten by an Ehren Kruger. It was directed by Hideo Nakata, who helmed the two Japanese films. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) slowly realizes that the menace from the first film has followed her and son Aidan (David Dorfman) to their new town. It begins as more-of-the-same-you-watch-you-die, but quickly and evidently ditches that subtext (anxieties over the dangers of media, perhaps more applicable in this time and place than anywhere else in the world, ever) and lapses into maternal melodrama. Yes, the very genre that Hollywood perfected with Stella Dallas (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1945). The emphasis on Keller’s matronly ways, which supersede every other concern in the film, says something – I’m still not quite sure what – about American attitudes toward being a mother. Perhaps its just a game of allusions to the past. After all, the film casts Sissy Spacek, forever to be remembered for her graphic menstruation and its subsequent guilt from Carrie (1976), as the neurotic mother who set the whole nefarious plan in motion and whose advice, oddly mirroring the mindset of the mother from that 1976 De Palma film, is to kill your baby before the world swallows it whole.The International Scene: Europe continues and the New British Horror Film

European horror cinema has its supporters, though its general inaccessibility and off-putting production values often pigeonhole it as cult matter. Worldwide interest in Italian maestros like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci has meant increased availability for a wide back catalog of work. Enough money circulates between television production budgets, independent financers, and nationalized film bureaus to keep Argento working. He has made a number of borderline decent movies in recent years, like the crime thriller Sleepless (2000), which fulfill basic genre expectation minus the ambition of his best work.

Filmmaker Brian Yuzna, whose directorial debut Society (1989) is one of the more memorable works of the 1980s, continues to make films from Spain. These low budget movies recall his earlier work and appear to allow him a considerable degree of control, either as director or producer. While their quality varies, they recall a style of filmmaking from a previous era.

Confronting the id in High TensionHorror thrives in France. From the prestige monster pic Belphegor (2001) to the already mentioned, baffling wonder Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) through the breakout High Tension (2003), genre movies from France are somewhat similar to their American brethren. High Tension has its fair share of adept moments, but its sexual politics are questionable: ultimately a meditation on gender and sexual difference, it places perversions and blame on repressed lesbianism.

London Calling: 28 Days LaterHorror films from Britain have undergone a recent renaissance. By the beginning of the 1990s, it had seemed British horror was all but extinct. Aided by the consistently solid work of Hammer Studios, Amicus Studios and Tigon, the British horror film thrived in the 1960s. Independently produced horror films peaked in the early 1970s. The 1980s saw a drastic slowdown in released titles, most of which were straight to video. Recent works of note include the much celebrated zombie film 28 Days Later (2002), the much publicized Shaun of the Dead (2004), and The Descent (2005). This later work, by Neil Marshall, proves that interesting subtextual meanings can coexist with a film that follows the new, streamlined aesthetic of shock and gore. The new British horror film bears the pedigree of inventiveness from the 1970s, with fused with a kind of hushed, automatic respect (to many Americans, British films are surrounded by an air of legitimacy – after all, their stage actors are from the same place as Shakespeare)!New Directions, the Hopes, and the Horrors

The horror film has proven resilient, thriving even in times of extreme social conservatism. Fashions of filmmaking change as quickly as do top 40 pop songs, and while some conventions are likely to remain, there are others that could become extinct.

The future of horror partially rests in the past. Two films slated for release within the next year, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse and the multi-authored Trapped Ashes, revive two extinct modes of presentation – the tailor-made B feature and the anthology film. Reportedly, the Tarantino picture will contain specifically filmed ads and previews to play in-between each feature. What these films seek to do is use nostalgic notions of spectatorship and reception in order to re-legitimize the horror film. Another film with potential is J.T. Petty’s sort-of-documentary S&man (2006), which probes the limits of fan discourse and examines the extremes to which certain interpretations of the genre have gone. The true terror suggested by the film is that these dreamers seemingly don’t know where to let their fandom stop. Whether or not this does the trick – i.e., presents a sensitive, feasible reading of historical value – is up to (what else) history to decide. While a view of the past is important to an understanding of the present, the seemingly haphazard pillaging of previous successes, remade to the latest aesthetic specifications, is not the right way to go. While I argue that fan misinterpretation has caused some of the woes of the current state of horror cinema, I remain convinced that fan ingenuity will eventually prove beneficial.