Horror has, as one of its primary aims, the goal of frightening us. This fear might be a matter of jump scares or creeping dread. It could be provoked by shocking gore or shuddery ghosts. But whatever the particular cause or impact, fear is horror’s defining element.
Of all the film genres, horror makes the least sense. We can see why audiences would be attracted to comedy, action-adventure, or romance, for people like to laugh; they enjoy excitement; they want to fall in love. Even a disreputable genre like pornography has an obvious appeal in that its images incite and satisfy lust. But horror is, by definition, frightening and thus repellent. To be ‘attracted to horror’ seems logically impossible – and psychologically perverse.
For what kind of viewers would voluntarily expose themselves to terrifying images and even seek them out to experience a strange sort of enjoyment? Are horror fans sadists who find pleasure in watching on-screen victims subjected to fear and suffering? As Roger Ebert wrote about Australia’s most notorious example of torture porn, ‘There is a line and this movie crosses it. I don’t know where the line is, but it’s way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?’1 Eli Roth, director of Hostel and The Green Inferno, may seem to confirm Ebert’s worst suspicions about horror filmmakers and viewers by saying, ‘I wanna see gore and bile. I love playing with the blood – everyone says I’m like a kid on Christmas morning, it’s so much fun!’2
Or are horror fans masochists who derive pleasure from unpleasant or dreadful experiences? Roth’s goal, he says, is to provide a ‘scene where people go “I shouldn’t have gotten a ticket for this movie; it’s going to be too much; I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the end; this is way more than I thought it was going to be” … everyone’s been waiting for that big scene and … the gore, the scares, and the kills [must] really deliver’.3 According to Roth, ‘If you’ve made an effective horror movie, at the end people should feel like shit.’4
Is it any surprise that horror is the most polarising of film genres, with its passionate defenders and equally vehement detractors, with its avid fans and others who wouldn’t be caught dead attending films of this kind? There are those who believe that horror films are a force for evil in the world. ‘Evil resided within the very celluloid of the film – that’s what Billy Graham said about The Exorcist’, director Scott Derrickson reminds us, noting that in his own techno-horror movie, Sinister, ‘evil resides within the very celluloid of these Super 8 films, and I think that it is an attitude that a lot of people have about the horror genre – that it’s not good, that it’s not healthy … to subject yourself to watching such awful things – which I obviously disagree with’.5
If we, too, disagree with the idea that such films spread sickness or evil, then we must ask, how can horror be healthy? The brilliant film critic Robin Wood once wrote that ‘the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses [psychologically] or oppresses [socially]’.6 Novelist Clive Barker, who knows a thing or two about the genre, said that ‘horror is a leap of faith and imagination in a world where the subconscious holds dominion; a call to enter a territory where no image or act is so damnable it cannot be explored, kissed, and courted; finally – why whisper it? – embraced’.7
Like Wood and Barker, I see horror as a way of exploring our fears, a place for confronting them and figuring out what – if anything – we should really be afraid of. A question I often ask when approaching a film is whether its horror is regressive, progressive, or (as in most cases) some combination of both. I define a progressive horror film as one that leads us towards overcoming our fear of difference, enlarging our understanding of and sympathy for ‘othered’ persons and experiences too often considered inimical to ourselves. By contrast, regressive horror solidifies old fears and refortifies traditional boundaries between us and ‘them’, confirming and even exacerbating phobic responses. The most intriguing horror films, it seems to me, are the ones in which the characters (and the filmmakers) are trying to work out how they feel about ‘others’, questioning received notions – and genre conventions – regarding what is threatening or ‘monstrous’ and seeking out new perspectives beyond a dread of difference.
In other words, horror is a messy genre of friend and fiend, attraction and repulsion. Horror is all about blurred lines and ambivalent feelings. This is particularly true of contemporary horror, which is in the vanguard when it comes to exploring uncharted territory and unresolved issues. ‘I’m not a fan of clearly cut lines between good and evil. There are layers to every human being,’ says David Robert Mitchell,8 whose film It Follows delves into sexual anxieties, and James Watkins, who made the ‘hoodie horror’ film Eden Lake, says that he admires movies which have a ‘sense of queasiness and moral awkwardness … where you’re not sure what to think, what to feel, or what is right’.9 Joss Whedon, co-writer of the self-conscious slasher film The Cabin in the Woods, describes a ‘horror movie’ as one that ‘contains a meditation on the human condition, asking questions about our darkest selves that you know going in cannot be answered’.10 Finally, playwright (and scenarist and director) Neil LaBute has said that he writes horrific scenes in order to ‘scamper away from the wolves I hear in the darkness’, but that ‘sometimes I can’t tell if I’m running toward the safety of the forest’s edge or deeper into its centre’.11
At one point in the modern classic horror film Don’t Look Now, the protagonist is asked, ‘What is it that you fear?’ The movie explores the possibilities: the foreigners of Venice, the female sex, the possibility of an afterlife in hell, his own unresolved guilt over the death of his daughter. My book asks the same question, examining horror films for what they can tell us about our fears. Some fears seem universal, such as those of disease, darkness and death – though different cultures adopt very different attitudes towards these. Other fears appear more specific to a time or place: eco-horror in an era increasingly cognizant of climate change and biological interconnectedness; body horror in a time of tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, and digital manipulation of the human form; torture porn in an America shocked by revelations of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’; and techno-horror in some Asian countries anxious about the effects of modernisation on traditional cultures.
Vampires have been with us for centuries, but ‘every age embraces the vampire it needs’,12 and so Let the Right One In involves its tween bloodsucker in a present-day narrative about bullying. According to its Swedish screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, ‘even though I don’t set out to write social commentary … it comes as a side effect because … horror, if taken seriously, becomes a form of criticism’.13 Other twenty first century filmmakers agree. ‘I am one of the directors who believes that genre is something you can use for communicating something important, more than just for having fun,’ notes Marcin Wrona,14 who made Demon, a horror film about how Poland is still haunted by the Holocaust. Scholar Brigid Cherry argues that ‘[h]orror films invariably reflect the social and political anxieties of the cultural moment’,15 and nowhere is this more true than in eco-horror, as can be seen in Larry Fessenden’s ‘global warming’ ghost film, The Last Winter. Believing that ‘horror as a genre is a responsibility’ beyond mere entertainment,16 Fessenden states that ‘in my films I’m trying to use horror tropes to explore contemporary issues’.17
There are many ways that one could carve up the current state of horror, but I have chosen to divide this book into three main sections: ‘nightmares’, ‘nations’ and ‘innovations’. ‘Nightmares’ looks at new manifestations of traditional fears, including cannibals, dolls, families, fathers, ghosts, haunted houses, holidays, mothers, possession, sharks, succubae, vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies. Also considered are more contemporary anxieties such as dread of ambition, disabilities, home invasion, homosexuals and senior citizens. ‘Nations’ explores fright films from around the world, including Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Russia, Serbia, South Korea, Spain and Sweden, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States. ‘Innovations’ focuses on the latest trends in terror, covering 3D horror, Asian horror and American remakes, body horror, eco-horror, found footage, neo-giallo, remakes of seventies horror, self-conscious slashers, techno-horror, teen romance, torture porn, and travesties and parodies. For each film examined, I provide the title, year of release and director, along with the principal stars and the roles they play. I then give an explanation of what each movie means, usually focusing on one or more of the most horrific scenes pertinent to its category. I often include quotes from the filmmakers themselves, who explain in their own words what they were trying to achieve. The book concludes with a list of books, videos and websites, which are recommended to those interested in further exploring the world of twenty first century horror films, along with notes and an index for handy reference.18
1 Roger Ebert, ‘Wolf Creek’, RogerEbert.com, 22 December 2005, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wolf-creek-2005.
2 Eli Roth in Jon Hamblin, ‘Eli Roth’, Horror: The Ultimate Celebration, Future Publishing, 2015, p. 122.
3 Ibid., p. 123.
4 Eli Roth, Director’s Audiocommentary, Hostel Blu-ray DVD, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007.
5 Scott Derrickson, Writers’ Audiocommentary, Sinister Blu-ray DVD, Summit Entertainment, 2013.
6 Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe, Toronto Festival of Festivals, 1979, p. 10.
7 Clive Barker in Stephen Jones, Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror, HarperPrism, 1997, p. 7.
8 David Robert Mitchell in Chris Alexander, ‘Follow You Down’, Fangoria, no. 341 (April 2015), p. 43.
9 James Watkins in Matt Risley, ‘James Watkins Interview: Eden Lake’, On the Box, 16 January 2009, http://blog.onthebox.com/2009/01/16/interview-horror-director-james-watkins-talks-about-eden-lake/.
10 Joss Whedon in Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion, Titan Books, 2012, p. 173.
11 Neil LaBute, In a Forest, Dark and Deep, Overlook Press, 2013, p. 18.
12 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 145.
13 John Ajvide Lindqvist in Steven Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television, Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 179.
14 Marcin Wrona in Sean Plummer, ‘The Past Won’t Stay Buried’, Rue Morgue, no. 170 (September 2016), p. 28.
15 Brigid Cherry, Horror, Routledge, 2009, p. 210.
16 Larry Fessenden in The Anatomy of Fear: Conversations with Cult Horror and Science Fiction Film Creators, edited by Chris Vander Kaay and Kathleen Fernandez-Vander Kaay, NorLightsPress, 2014, p. 135.
17 Larry Fessenden, booklet insert, The Larry Fessenden Collection Blu-ray DVD, Shout Factory, 2015.
18 This book also discusses three films from the end of the last century – The Blair Witch Project (1999), Ringu (1998), and The Sixth Sense (1999) – because of their trend-setting influence on key aspects of twenty first century horror, namely found-footage films, techno-horror, and ghost movies, respectively.