Horror, The Film Reader: General Introduction

Mark Jancovich

And Here... We... Go...

• Horror, it turns out, is written about more than any other genre (as of the book’s publication in 2002)
• Used to be the Western
• Moral panics and calls for censorship
• Raises questions of cultural analysis and cultural policy
• Genres are not always clear…
• Implicit and explicit
• Genres change depending on contexts and time periods
• The Innocents (Clayton, 1961), Repulsion (Polanski, 1965) and Satyricon (Fellini, 1970) were all discussed as central moments in the history of horror in the 60s and 70s
• German Expressionist films were not seen as “Horror” in their day...

History of Writing on the Genre

• 2 key questions:
• 1. What does one mean by terms such as “horror?” Or, how does one define the horror genre and its essential features?
• 2. What is a film genre, what should be meant by the term “genre” when it’s used in film studies?
• David J. Russell: horror centered around the monster and the conflict arising in the fantastical and unreal monster’s relationship with normality
• Horror studies tend to focus on textual interpretations rather than contexts of production, mediation, or consumption (the book aims to cover these 3)
• Earlier works influence later works (obviously), but it’s not a linear progression (as is the case in most academic studies - especially in the humanities)
• One must know the past in order to progress into the future lest ye repeat the past...

A Brief History

• Georges Melies and his contemporaries (Le Manoir du Diable (1896))
• German Expressionism!
• 1930s Hollywood
• Connects Gothic Literature with film
• Val Lewton RKO films of the 40s (Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), I Walked With a Zombie (Tourneur, 1943))
• Take place in recognizably modern world
• Reality as we know it is questioned
• 1950s SciFi/Horror (Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Tarantula, I Was a Teenage Werewolf)
• Scientific America!
• Invaders… (War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still)
• Atomic Age/Cold War
• Teenage audiences
• Hammer Films (Dracula, The Brides of Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein)
• British, Gothic worlds, vibrant colors, gory for the time, cheaply made

A Brief History Continued...

• Mario Bava in Italy in 1960s
• Jess Franco in Spain in 1960s
• Psycho (Hitchcock) in 1960!
• “Single-handedly” transformed horror genre in two ways:
• 1. Horror is within the context of modern American society
• 2. Horror is located within modern American family more specifically
• Average young man as the monster… Unaware and unable to control monstrosity
• Crisis of identity in American society
• Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) - family horror films
• Horror auteurs of the 1970s!
• Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, Brian de Palma, etc.

A (clearly-not-so-brief) History Continued...

• Slashers of the late 70s and 80s
• Deeply conservative, particularly toward women
• Audience identifies with the killer (POV)
• “Slutty” girls must die… Girls that resist definition within virgin/wife/mother framework...
• Violent reaction against feminism
• Absence of male heroes - Final Girl!
• 1970s-1980s SciFi/Horror and Body Horror
• Alien (Scott, 1979)
• David Cronenberg
• Genre hybridization
• Re-workings and remakes of 1950s SciFi/Horror films
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders From Mars, The Blob
• Aliens references Them! throughout

A Brief (?) History Continued...

• Body Horror
• Postmodern collapse of distinction and boundaries
• Monstrous threat erupts from within human body - the body as monstrous
• Challenges distinction between self and other, inside and outside
• Fear of physicality and sexuality according to Wood
• The Fly, The Brood, Shivers, Videodrome
• Video Nasties
• VHS, Home Video
• Sensational, straight-to-video, low-budget, adult, outside Hollywood
• Campaign for Censorship
• Horror Comedies
• American Werewolf in London, Return of the Living Dead, Fright Night, The Lost Boys, Drag Me To Hell, Dead Alive
• Period of decline, highly self-conscious, mocked the genre

A Long History Continued...

• Big-Budget Horror films of the 90s
• Star casts and big-name directors
• Silence of the Lambs, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Interview with the Vampire
• “Quality films”, short-lived cycle
• Scream!
• Spawned sequels and imitators
• Slasher films but treated ironically
• Commercial appropriation of “authentic” horror
• The Blair Witch Project!
• Post-Cinema, low-budget, gimmick?
• Marketing! Promotion!
• Turning back to the 70s
• Remakes and Re-workings once again...

Re-Examining History of Horror

• Halloween was not a slasher since the term didn’t exist…
• Tell that to the characters in Scream!
• Became the term retrospectively, similar to Film Noir
• Critics often take one period as representative of the whole
• Or a few films as representative of a period…
• History of horror is not a narrative
• Films can radically change meanings over time!
• New contexts of media and consumption - Douglas Sirk

From Horror as Formula to Horror as Structure

• Genre films are “formula” films
• Mass-culture theory and auteurism
• Adorno and Horkheimer
• “Illusion of choice” or “pseudo-individualistic”, passivity in audiences
• Standardization in production and familiarity in consumption
• Collection of films related to one another - invariant narrative pattern
• We know how it will end
• Genre films too obvious for analysis
• Structuralist approach (Levi-Strauss - linguistics)
• Identify the specific recurrent oppositions that define a specific genre - its “deep structure”
• Langue = structure of language
• Parole = individual speech act
• Difficult to ultimately define based on its structure
• Robin Wood draws on structuralism - more to come...

From Genre as Structure to Genre as Consensus

• Identifying the “Factor X” is a huge problem with genre studies
• Factor X = the central opposition or contradiction between normality and otherness as part of the structuralist understanding of genre
• Policing boundaries is the structuralist project - “this film REALLY is a horror film. That one is not, and here’s why”
• Eventually excludes everything or includes everything
• Post-structuralist approach from Neale - genres not as systems but as processes of systemization
• Misogyny within the horror genre (!) (?)
• Conservative sexual politics
• What about the audience and how they affect genre?
• Cultural conventions? Collective understanding?

From Genre as Structure to Genre as Consensus Continued...

• Altman thinks collective belief over a genre is impossible
• History of genre study has been dominated by the search for “essences”
• Genre terms are unstable, ambiguous, and resistant to any essential definition
• Little interest in consumption compared to production and mediation
• Semantic/Syntactic Approach:
• Semantic = a cataloguing of common traits, characters, attitudes, locations, sets, shots, etc.
• Syntactic = defines genre in terms of the structural relationship between elements that carry its thematic and social meaning
• Len Ang says it’s not the fact of differences but the meaning of differences that matter
• Contexts!
• Maltby and Craven say audiences recognize genres from plot structures as well as through advertising, iconography, and gestural codes

From Genre as Structure to Genre as Consensus Continued...

• When people say they don’t like horror, this is often not a neutral claim - implicit claims
• “Horror is moronic, sick, and potentially dangerous”
• “I am a healthy, sane, and reasonable person”
• Genre criticism is about more than texts, or even the changing contexts within which they are produced
• Contexts of production, mediation, and consumption are important
• The aim of our book!