It’s Spooktober, and you know what that means! Everyone on Twitter is making the same insipid arguments about elevated horror and trauma in the horror genre. The endless discourse included this interview with John Carpenter from the AV Club.
The term “elevated horror” gets overused a lot, either by people who feel they need to justify enjoying a horror movie, or by people criticizing the whole concept, “because horror was always about trauma” or “because there has always been some form of elevated horror.” I sympathize more with the latter, but the terms of the conversation bother me. Of course some horror has “always” been about trauma (although I don’t think you can say The House of the Devil (1896) is about trauma). More than trauma, these films are about social fears. In the best slashers, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, the fears are ambient and tacit, not explicitly named. Fear of nuclear fallout, the isolation of the suburbs, the rise of serial killers – these fears have given us some of our most memorable horror films. They allow us to indulge the fears, rather than understand them through the framework of trauma.
We fear death, demons and, yes, crazed killers invading our home. Those fears are primal; they don’t bend to the will of psychology or conform to our political opinions, because fear lives in a deeper part of the brain. Horror isn’t about expressing political ideas or exorcising trauma – it’s about violence and anger, the rage and fear that live in the minds of humans.
And that’s just it – these films explore fear, not trauma. Fear is sensory, visceral, cathartic. Trauma, while embodied, is a memory, the past. Horror lives in the painstaking and terrifying present, the intensity of suspense, the immediate feeling of life or death. Fear is an inherently reactionary feeling.
The rules to not get killed in horror, as articulated by Scream – don’t have sex, don’t drink or do drugs – are socially conservative, but that’s not what is so reactionary about the genre. Stephen King writes that going to horror movies helps to “reestablish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary.” It’s our desire to see our rage play out on screen, to maintain some kind of social order, that makes the form so reactionary. The conversation around elevated horror misses that impulse.
Get Out was the genesis of elevated horror. Horror had Oscar buzz; horror had great actors and a lot of depth and symbolism. This wasn’t some dumb slasher, everyone said. Get Out, and the films that followed, wear their politics on their sleeve. It plays perfectly into the trap that so many movies fall into now – is this a “good” movie morally, or a “good” movie aesthetically? Does it say things I like, or does it present complicated things I can’t discern the morality of, and therefore fail as an art piece?
I liked Get Out a lot – it’s scary, well-made and well-performed. I think we’ll look back on Get Out as a defining film of the late 10s. But what has followed in its footsteps has mostly missed the bar Get Out set. Rather than borrowing its visual style or its funny, sharp voice, it takes the feeling of being on the right side of history, and runs with that instead. Horror was at its most explicitly political in the Trump era – not just Get Out, but The Purge: Election Year, Green Room, 10 Cloverfield Lane. These aren’t bad movies. They contain interesting ideas, scary moments and compelling performances. But it’s easy for films like these to get bogged down in politics, and that’s why each of them ultimately fails.
As Carpenter says later in the interview referenced above, good horror movies have always had thematic material – not necessarily a political message, but some kind of human theme the filmmaker processes through violence and gore. As Stephen King writes, horror provides “psychic relief,” the catharsis of fear, fear that ends when the movie does.
The more recent turn in horror, heralded by Hereditary and Halloween (2018), can be read as post-MeToo, politicized trauma narratives.
With every subsequent Halloween movie, Laurie Strode has become more empowered, more aware of her trauma, and more capable of fighting Michael Myers. She also turns her trauma into content, not unlike Sidney Prescott does in the Scream franchise – soooo 2017! The focus on empowerment takes all the power out of these stories. Laurie is no longer a babysitter having the worst night of her life, and doing her best to survive it – she is a superhuman, just like Michael Myers, with unique powers of survival.
Women have always loved horror, even – and especially – when it was about the oppression and subjugation of women, in explicit and unsympathetic ways. The turn in horror towards literalizing trauma destroys what women have always loved about the genre. By making it “safer” for women’s consumption, the transgressive thrill, which is the real power of these films, is gone. I don’t think John Carpenter or Brian De Palma or Tobe Hooper realize why the images they created are powerful for women – they just followed what was compelling. Their work prioritized the visceral, the bodily, allowing the viewer to make their own conclusions about the political meaning of the work. By making horror on the instinctual, subconscious level on which it naturally operates, these filmmakers created some of the most indelible images and characters in horror, from Carrie White covered in pigs blood to Sally screaming in the back of a truck at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Sally screaming isn’t about trauma – trauma is what comes after, what she’ll no doubt be dealing with after the movie ends. Her scream is reaction, horror, pure fear.
Almost any horror movie can be interpreted as either right or left wing – is The Exorcist pro-Catholic Church? Is Jaws pro-cop? Is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the rural family guarding their property, trying to survive – or does it side with the hippie drifters? Or does Tobe Hooper hate the hillbillies and the hippies equally? I don’t really care. To analyze it one way or another is to miss the point, the joy of sitting back and existing, for 90 minutes, in a world of black and white, good and evil. According to King, “the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.”
Perhaps that anarchic, reactionary spirit is what is lost. It isn’t revolutionary to examine complex ideas like race, violence and gender within the narrow confines of Hollywood. What horror needs to stay alive is the spirit of filmmakers, like Hooper, Di Palma and Carpenter, willing to offend, disturb and terrify their audiences. Isn’t that what we’re craving?
Horror should be nasty, gross, hateful – it has a role to play in our culture. Horror “appeals to all that is worst in us,” wrote King. Horror has a duty to be ugly, to show us our own darkest impulses, to portray murder and sexual violence and torture without comment or judgement. Horror needs to terrify – and that has a social purpose that has nothing to do with trauma
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