Twenty First Century Horror Films E-Book

Douglas Keesey

• Herausgeber: Kamera Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 398

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

From the vengeful ghosts of J-horror to the walking dead in 28 DaysLater and World War Z, from the creepiness of Spain's haunted houses to the graphic gore of the New French Extremism, horror is everywhere in the twenty-first century. This lively and illuminating book explores over 100 contemporary horror films, providing insightful and provocative readings of what they mean while including numerous quotes from their creators. Some of these films, including The Babadook, The Green Inferno, It Follows, The Neon Demon, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Witch are so recent that this will be one of the first times they are discussed in book form. The book is divided into three main sections: 'nightmares', 'nations' and 'innovations'. 'Nightmares' looks at new manifestations of traditional fears, including creepy dolls, haunted houses and demonic possession as well as vampires, werewolves, witches and zombies; and also considers more contemporary anxieties such as dread of home invasion and homophobia. 'Nations' explores fright films from around the world, including Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Spain and Sweden as well as the UK and the US. 'Innovations' focuses on the latest trends in terror from 3D to found-footage films, from Twilight teen romance to torture porn, and from body horror and eco-horror to techno-horror. Parodies, remakes and American adaptations of Asian horror are also discussed.

Leseprobe

OTHER BOOKS BY DOUGLAS KEESEY

Neo-Noir

Contemporary Erotic Cinema

To my mother, for taking me to the drive-in so that I could see

House of Dark Shadowswhen I was ten;

To my father, for accompanying me so that I could seeCarriewhen I was fifteen; and

To my brother, for lovingThe Legend of BigfootandThe Giant Spider Invasionas much as I did.

A NOTE TO THE READER

This book gives explanations of what these movies mean. Because a film’s ending is often essential to its meaning, there are spoilers ahead. Readers who wish to avoid them are advised to see the films before reading this book.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Nightmares

2. Nations

3. Innovations

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

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 ofWolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty?’1Eli Roth, director ofHostelandThe 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’.3According 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 aboutThe 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 civilisationrepresses [psychologically] oroppresses [socially]’.6Novelist 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,8whose filmIt Followsdelves into sexual anxieties, and James Watkins, who made the ‘hoodie horror’ filmEden 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’.9Joss Whedon, co-writer of the self-conscious slasher filmThe 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’.10Finally, 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 filmDon’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’,12and soLet the Right One Ininvolves 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’.13Other 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,14who madeDemon, 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’,15and 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,16Fessenden 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

Notes

1Roger Ebert,‘Wolf Creek’,RogerEbert.com, 22 December 2005, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wolf-creek-2005.

2Eli Roth in Jon Hamblin, ‘Eli Roth’,Horror: The Ultimate Celebration, Future Publishing, 2015, p. 122.

3Ibid., p. 123.

4Eli Roth, Director’s Audiocommentary,HostelBlu-ray DVD, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007.

5Scott Derrickson, Writers’ Audiocommentary,SinisterBlu-rayDVD, Summit Entertainment, 2013.

6Robin 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.

7Clive Barker in Stephen Jones,Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror, HarperPrism, 1997, p. 7.

8David Robert Mitchell in Chris Alexander, ‘Follow You Down’,Fangoria, no. 341 (April 2015), p. 43.

9James 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/.

10Joss Whedon in Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon,The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion, Titan Books, 2012, p. 173.

11Neil LaBute,In a Forest, Dark and Deep, Overlook Press, 2013, p. 18.

12Nina Auerbach,Our Vampires, Ourselves, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 145.

13John Ajvide Lindqvist in Steven Peacock,Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television, Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 179.

14Marcin Wrona in Sean Plummer, ‘The Past Won’t Stay Buried’,Rue Morgue, no. 170 (September 2016), p. 28.

15Brigid Cherry,Horror, Routledge, 2009, p. 210.

16Larry Fessenden inThe 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.

17Larry Fessenden, booklet insert,The Larry Fessenden CollectionBlu-rayDVD, Shout Factory, 2015.

18This book also discusses three films from the end of the last century –The Blair Witch Project(1999),Ringu(1998), andThe 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.

NIGHTMARES

AMBITION

American Psycho(2000)

Director:Mary Harron

Cast:Christian Bale (Bateman)

Serial killer Patrick Bateman plunges an axe into a man’s face and uses a chainsaw to cut a woman’s body in half. ‘Basically, he’s a monster and there’s no explaining it,’ says director Mary Harron.19Granted, to trace all of Bateman’s crimes to one root cause would be absurdly reductive, as in Bateman’s own glib explanation, ‘Hey, I’m a child of divorce. Give me a break.’ However, to claim that his actions are inexplicable is equally facile and problematic, for it risks a surrender to apathy (he’s an insoluble mystery, so there’s nothing we can do) or a demonisation of him (he’s just inherently evil, so all we can do is destroy him). Interestingly, Bateman himself concludes at the end of the film that ‘I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling [of my crimes].’ But is this true? A lack of one root cause does not mean that there aren’t multiple, interrelated reasons for his bad behaviour.

It is New York City in the 1980s, a time when yuppies like Bateman are being encouraged to think that ‘greed is good’. He and his fellow junior executives work for a Wall Street firm called Pierce & Pierce, a name that connects profit-seeking with stabbing. The cutthroat competition among these men is emphasised when, each time one of them tries to conquer the others by pulling out a better business card, we hear the sound of ‘a sword being whipped out of a sheath’, as Harron explains.20When Bateman later attacks his colleague with an axe, he is merely taking this business rivalry over which man has the most clout to its logical – albeit extreme – conclusion.

This avariciously materialistic environment tends to ruin Bateman’s relationships with women. Purchasing magazines likePlayboyand renting video porn, he comes to view women as sexual objects to be bought and consumed. When Bateman emerges from under the sheets after oral sex on a female, his mouth is bloody from having literally eaten her out. For Bateman, the meat market is not just a metaphor. He keeps a prostitute’s severed head in his refrigerator, as if for late-night snacking. He has female corpses hanging in his closet like animal carcasses in a slaughterhouse. And he takes a bite out of a woman’s leg before butchering her with a chainsaw, imitating what he saw done in a video ofThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

In a sense, Bateman is slavishly devoted to media images, even attempting to find his own identity in them. The problem is that no one can live up to the impossible ideal they represent. The escorts he hires for the night aren’t blonde enough, smoke when they shouldn’t, and fail to appreciate a fine chardonnay. Worse, they seem unimpressed by his big-shot job or the big biceps he flexes in the mirror during sex. Bateman needs the women he is with to be perfect so that they can serve as a reflection of him as the perfect man, and when they fail to live up to his media-driven standards, he takes it as an affront to his core being. His murderous rage at them is anger at himself for what he sees as his own inferior performance as a successful man.

‘Something horrible is happening inside of me,’ Bateman thinks, ‘and I don’t know why.’ But, based on all the evidence in the film, we do.21

Starry Eyes(2014)

Directors:Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

Cast:Alexandra Essoe (Sarah), Louis Dezseran (Producer), FabianneTherese (Erin), Pat Healy (Carl), Noah Segan (Danny), Shane Coffey (Poe)

Aspiring actress Sarah makes a Faustian deal with a devil-worshipping cult and sells her soul to become a Hollywood star. Her moral corruption shows itself as physical rot, with her hair and a tooth falling out, blood coming from her mouth and crotch, and a stomach ache that leads to her vomiting up maggots. She prostitutes herself to a producer for a movie part and goes on a Charles Manson-style rampage, murdering all her friends who served as her conscience and tried to stop her. As co-director Dennis Widmyer says, his movie is about ‘ambition manifested as a monster. The idea that to get what you want, how far will you go? What will you do and what would that do to you mentally and physically?’22

This ‘Hollywood horror’ film certainly reveals how frightening the success-driven Sarah becomes (its tagline is ‘She would kill to be famous’), but the more appalling horror may actually lie in the supposedly normal people surrounding her. Sarah’s friend Erin, also a wannabe actress, ‘jokes’ about stealing roles from her and sending in her own headshot for parts Sarah fails to get. At the restaurant where Sarah works part-time, her boss, Carl, presents himself as a respectable businessman running a family-friendly establishment, but he also leers at her in her tight-fitting top, and the place he presides over is called Big Taters (modelled on Hooters). Sarah’s male friends Danny and Poe – the first an aspiring filmmaker and the latter more of a private pornographer – shoot videos of their girlfriends cavorting in skimpy bikinis, and Poe grabs surreptitious footage, which he calls ‘Sick, Slutty Sarah’, of her when she is tearing off her clothes because she feels ill. In their exploitation of her body, these two guys and her boss are not so very different from the producer who subjects her to his satanic casting couch. And why should Sarah have to pull some of her own hair out, as she is asked to do at the audition, to show how committed she would be to a part? Why should any actress need to have sex with the producer, as Sarah is bid to do, in order to land a movie role? These are monstrous aspects of movie culture that must share a great deal of the blame for bringing out the monster in her. ‘Let me see the real Sarah,’ the producer says. ‘Embrace who you are.’ But they are the ones helping her to create this terrible creature and pushing her to become it. When Sarah slashes the envious and rivalrous Erin in the face, when she stabs sneakily invasive Poe in the back, and when she cuts her boyfriend, Danny, near the groin after he sleeps with Erin, Sarah is not without cause, for they have all helped to make her what she has become. When we first see Sarah at the beginning of the film, she is standing before her bedroom mirror and, despite looking model-perfect, pinching the flesh at her sides out of fear that she is fat – a fear that drives her murderous path to stardom, to be admired by millions on the silver screen. Did this fear really come from inside, or was it moulded by a culture that reduces women to their bodies and makes them feel inadequate?

The Neon Demon(2016)

Director:Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast:Elle Fanning (Jesse), Keanu Reeves (Hank), Abbey Lee (Sarah), Jena Malone (Ruby), Bella Heathcote (Gigi)

Sixteen-year-old Jesse, an aspiring fashion model, becomes the ‘It’ girl of the moment. ‘You’re going to be great,’ her agent tells her. ‘She has that “thing”,’ says her make-up artist. And a fashion mogul describes her as ‘a diamond in a sea of glass’. But what is the ‘It’ that Jesse has? ‘You can’t put your finger on it,’ says director Nicolas Winding Refn. ‘You can’t define it, you can’t imitate it. That’s what having “It” means.’23Some viewers of this film have noted that there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about the way Jesse looks, other than her fresh face and youthful appearance, but that is precisely the point. Because Jesse is new on the fashion scene, characters project onto her their own ideal of what is beautiful. ‘Beauty,’ says Refn, ‘really comes in the eye of the beholder,’ and so ‘people essentially make up their own interpretation of what [Jesse] may or may not look like.’24Unfortunately, rather than realising that Jesse’s allure is the result of their own projected desire for perfection, the people around her start to envy her beauty and to reduce it to something merely physical, like youthful flesh, which they try to possess. ‘Men want to sexualise youth,’ Refn comments, and ‘women want to consume it.’25Thus a motel manager named Hank tries to break into Jesse’s room to eat some ‘hard candy’, and she has nightmares of him making her open her mouth wider and wider to swallow his knife. Hank then actually rapes the even younger girl – a ‘real Lolita’ – in the room right next to Jesse’s.

When Jesse is chosen for a fashion shoot over rival Sarah, who was last season’s ‘It’ girl, the older model smashes her own ageing image in the mirror. Jesse runs to help, but when she accidentally cuts herself on one of the mirror shards, Sarah sucks the blood from Jesse’s hand as if trying to drink in her youthful vitality and good looks. ‘Who wants sour milk when you can get fresh meat?’, a jealous Sarah wonders, denigrating herself as an old cow and representing Jesse as a calf to be slaughtered. Sarah’s words subtract the soul from beauty, leaving only its carnal dimension. There is a white statue of a female angel behind make-up artist Ruby when she praises Jesse for having ‘such beautiful skin’, but Ruby shows no regard for that spiritual side when she tries to force herself on the virginal Jesse, hungry for her flesh. Earlier, a live cougar had broken into Jesse’s room, and in the scene after Ruby pounces on Jesse, the older woman is shown reflected in a mirror alongside a stuffed wildcat. When Ruby’s advances are rejected, she goes to a morgue where, desperate in her desire, she kisses and fondles a female corpse that looks like Jesse. In a sense, this scene reveals what Ruby had done to Jesse, for in treating her beloved as nothing more than a body for her devouring kisses and mauling hands, Ruby had voided that flesh of spirit, reducing it to a kind of corpse. In her desire to possess Jesse’s beautiful skin, Ruby had thought of nobody but herself.

Interestingly, Ruby’s molestation of the corpse from chest to crotch is cross-cut with images of Jesse’s fondling of her own breasts and genitals, and the two women climax at the same time. As opposed to Ruby and her rapacious narcissism, Jesse can be seen as exemplifying a healthy self-love. To another model’s comment that ‘nobody likes the way they look’, Jesse’s reply is ‘I do’. Onstage during a fashion show with some other lookalike models, Jesse appears to be kissing them while simultaneously kissing her own reflection in a three-way mirror, as if she is able to balance self-love with regard for others. In other scenes, Jesse also appears to balance on the edge of a cliff overlooking Los Angeles, and at the end of a diving board above an empty swimming pool. Viewed from below, it looks as though she is half-flying, her beauty transcendent but also grounded in the flesh, a precarious balance of body and soul.

But Jesse’s masturbation scene could also be viewed as one of vainglorious self-infatuation, and soon after, she uses the diving board as a platform to declare herself more beautiful than Ruby, who is standing below her in the empty pool. It would seem that Jesse is increasingly corrupted by the envious women who surround her, pulled into their egomania and jealous rivalry. Subsequently, Ruby, flanked by fashion models Sarah and Gigi, will push Jesse off that diving board, and her broken body dies on the concrete below. The three women then cannibalise Jesse’s flesh, with Ruby bathing in her blood while watching Sarah and Gigi lick the remainder of it off their bodies in the shower – a nadir of narcissism and carnal appetite. Afterwards, Ruby lies naked in the moonlight with her legs spread, smiling as if about to give birth to herself as the image of her soulmate, Jesse. But while Ruby may imagine communing with Jesse’s spirit, the fact is that she destroyed her beloved’s beauty, emptying it of soul, and devoured her dead body. In the process, Ruby killed her own soul, so it is fitting that, rather than giving birth, she bleeds out from between her legs, with the departure of her vital spirit leaving her a corpse.

CANNIBALS

The Descent(2005)

Director:Neil Marshall

Cast:Shauna Macdonald (Sarah), Oliver Milburn (Paul), Alex Reid (Beth),Natalie Mendoza (Juno)

Sarah, her husband, Paul, and their young daughter are in a car collision and the latter two are killed, with Paul being impaled by a pole that flies off the other vehicle. One year later, Sarah goes on a spelunking expedition with some female friends, who hope to help her overcome her grief. But as they are headed towards their destination in the Appalachian Mountains, Sarah drives recklessly through the wooded area, which is similar to the one where the car accident occurred. Does she have a death wish prompted by survivor’s guilt? Upon arriving at their cabin, Sarah imagines a pole breaking through window glass to spear her in the eye in the same way that her husband was killed, as though she remains haunted by the desire to join him.

Sarah descends into the mouth of the cave as if into an open grave, and after exploring the underground passageways for a while, she becomes trapped in a narrow tunnel and panics. ‘The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened and you’re still here,’ her friend Beth reassures her, but is Sarah scared of being buried alive or of her own longing for the grave? ‘What it is about is a descent into madness,’ writer-director Neil Marshall said of his film.26The caving expedition could provide the opportunity for Sarah to work through the trauma of the accident and move past her grief, but it could also be the occasion for a further decline into terminal melancholy and insanity. Despite being warned that the claustrophobic environment of the caves might induce ‘panic attacks’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘hallucinations’, Sarah begins to see savage predators crawling around in the tunnels. Marshall cautions us that ‘maybe the crawlers are just a figment of Sarah’s imagination’.27In one scene, Sarah thinks she sees her daughter from behind, but when the girl turns around, her face is that of a viciously threatening crawler. If Sarah does not learn how to deal with the death of her daughter, that loss will become a menace from beyond the grave, dragging her down with it.

In another scene, a frightened Sarah ‘sees’ a crawler, turns around quickly to escape, and is startled to find her friend Juno standing there. As if to rouse Sarah from her paranoia, Juno says, ‘Look at me. There’s nothing there.’ Juno promises to help Sarah find a way out of the caves, but adds importantly that ‘I can’t do it unless you’re with me’. Yet in order to join up with Juno, Sarah must move past fearing her as an enemy. Juno had betrayed Sarah by sleeping with her husband, Paul. In fact, Paul was lying to Sarah about this very adultery just before the car accident in which he died. Moreover, Juno effectively abandoned Sarah after the accident, never visiting her in the hospital. Now, on this caving expedition one year later, Juno makes repeated attempts to apologise, but she is continually rebuffed by Sarah, leading Juno to say, ‘Why don’t you try and find us a way through?’ – referring to the caves and their troubled relationship.

However, what Sarah sees (or imagines) Juno doing in the caves only serves to increase her own paranoia. As Juno is defending herself against a crawler attack, she turns around quickly and accidentally sinks her pickaxe into Beth. Juno then leaves the wounded woman behind. A dying Beth later tells Sarah about the abandonmentandabout the affair Juno had with Paul, revealing that he had given Juno a ‘Love Each Day’ pendant. Juno’s desertion of Beth reminds Sarah of when Juno abandonedherat the hospital, and the pickaxing of Beth brings back the impalement of Paul, for which Sarah blames Juno. And so, overcome by an insane rage at her friend’s betrayals, Sarah skewers Juno’s leg with a pickaxe and then abandons her to the deadly crawlers. In effect, Sarah has herself regressed to the primitive state of a crawler, striking savagely at others. Rather than inspiring her to ‘Love Each Day’, the memory of her husband becomes a reason to take revenge and cause the death of Juno. Thus, when Sarah finally manages to climb out of the caves and into the sun, her escape is revealed to be a deceptive dream. The sight of Juno’s bloody ghost, representing Sarah’s guilt over what she did to her friend, frightens her into waking up back in the cave. Forgiveness and compassion would have allowed Sarah to see the light; revenge has only dragged her down again. Showing that she still has some longing for humanity within her, Sarah is briefly comforted by a vision of her daughter and a birthday cake – before the candles go out and Sarah is left in the darkness with the other crawlers.

The Green Inferno(2013)

Director:Eli Roth

Cast:Antonieta Pari (Village Elder), Ramón Llao (Headhunter)

How can you make a cannibal movie in these culturally sensitive times? Writer-director Eli Roth’s attempt is incoherent in interesting ways. When a group of student activists journeys to the Amazon to block the bulldozing of the rainforests and the destruction of indigenous peoples, they are captured by a local tribe. Horror-movie conventions dictate that the threat be made as scary as possible, so these natives are presented as repellently brutish and barbaric. With their bodies coated in red ochre, they look as though they have bathed in blood. The female village elder has a dead-white eye and strands of beads that look like snakes strung through her nose. The chief headhunter, painted a devilish black, has horn-like bones protruding from his nose and wears a collar composed of spiky teeth. Together, the two of them lead their tribe in committing atrocities on their student captives. While he is still alive, one student has his eyes gouged out and swallowed, his tongue cut off and consumed, and his limbs amputated prior to his torso being cooked in an oven. Village children delight in holding the flayed skin of a tattooed female student up against their bodies, and the headhunter enjoys playing with her severed arm and making faces at her flesh-stripped skull.

However, the movie emphasises that the tribespeople only attack because they mistake the students for the enemy (since, when captured, they were wearing construction uniforms in order to infiltrate the logging operation). Moreover, Roth has stressed how much the peaceful and polite natives in the village where he filmedlikedportraying cannibals. ‘They were so nice and they just loved what we were doing,’ Roth comments. ‘These [local] women were so great at cutting the body,’ he says, adding, ‘I love the kids biting here. It’s so funny.’28Perhaps we have all reached such a stage of mutual respect (and sufficient food and shelter) that we can applaud the good time that the villagers may have had pretending to disembowel the students, but it is hard not to see the film’s images of natives cannibalising whites as reinforcing racist stereotypes of indigenous tribes as savages. Positive accounts of happy attitudes behind the scenes and verbal justifications within the movie for the villagers’ attacks hardly seem to compensate for our visceral reaction to the visuals of flesh-devouring brutes.

Why do the natives have to be devilish savages, and why does the Amazon have to be a ‘green inferno’? Roth has an emotional investment in seeing the jungle as hell, in viewing its inhabitants as ‘absolutely barbaric, primitive man’,29because he wants to experience an ‘adventurous, dangerous kind of filmmaking’30where he and his crew journey deep into the primordial jungle and where they ‘could have died any number of times – there were floods, and there were rock-slides; there were tarantulas and snakes’.31And, for the characters at least, there were cannibals who could cook and eat them. One of the earliest inspirations for his horror films, Roth has said, was ‘being Jewish and growing up hearing stories about the Holocaust. If you didn’t finish your food, my parents would be like, “You could have been in an oven in Poland.”’32The student activists are kept in a communal cage like a concentration camp, and some of them are taken to an oven. ‘My God, I can smell my friend being cooked,’ one says and ends up eating part of that person. IsThe Green InfernoRoth’s vicarious way of experiencing what it might have been like for his Jewish ancestors in the Nazi death camps? What terrible things would people be driven to do in order to survive? The tattooed pieces of skin are similar to inmate identification numbers, and one escaped character’s remorse over leaving another behind in the cage is reminiscent of Holocaust survivor’s guilt. When a tarantula threatens a male student’s exposed penis and when the natives threaten the female students with genital mutilation, these can be seen as Roth’s exploration of fears related to Jewish rites of circumcision. Finally, when a female captive is able to use a small flute passed down to her by her female ancestors in order to connect with the human compassion in one of her captors, we are reminded of the role that music played in the concentration camps as a means of sustaining hope.

DISABILITIES

The Quiet(2005)

Director:Jamie Babbit

Cast:Camilla Belle (Dot), Elisha Cuthbert (Nina), Martin Donovan (Nina’sFather), Shawn Ashmore (Connor)

Dot hasn’t spoken a word since age seven when her mother died. This traumatic or sympathetic muteness, her keeping as quiet as her mother in the grave, was then joined by a kind of deafness as Dot pretended – or convinced herself – that she couldn’t hear in order to feel closer to her remaining parent, her deaf father. Years later, when her father dies, the now-teenaged Dot is adopted by her godparents. Their daughter, Nina, and her bitchy best friend torment and ostracise Dot at school, deeming her a ‘freak’ and a ‘retard’. Cut off from her fellow students by their attitude towards her disability, Dot glides ghost-like down the school corridors in a deaf-mute daze. Divided from the living, she spends more time communing with the dead, playing Beethoven on the piano as she used to do for her father, who, like the deaf composer, could sense the instrument’s vibrations.

If Dot is like a gothic heroine haunted by her past, then Nina is like the girl in a horror movie whose fear of a monster invading her bedroom comes true, for her father comes to her at night and insists on having sex with her. The man she trusted to love and care for her turns out to be a monster who imposes his selfish demands on her. Dot, whose continuing and creepily close attachment to her own father could also be seen as morbid and unhealthy, is especially attuned to Nina’s suffering, and Nina tells her incestuous secret to Dot, finding her to be the perfect confidante because she ‘cannot’ hear and thus will not tell anyone else about it.

Dot also feels a growing likeness to – and liking for – a boy her age named Connor, who confides in her about his struggles with disability (attention deficit disorder) and his fears of sexual failure, assuming all the while that she is deaf. Dot agrees to make love with him, but when he then ignores her bodily needs and uses the occasion merely to prove himself a man, she later rejects him, prompting him to act possessively and domineeringly towards her, much as Nina’s father does to Nina. Connor also discovers that Dot may have been capable of hearing the secrets he told her about himself, which causes him to feel ashamed of what he revealed and angry at her for deceiving him.

In the end, Nina helps Dot escape from Connor. In addition, as Nina’s father is about to rape Nina for having finally rejected him, Dot, who has been playing the piano ‘for’ her deceased father, hears Nina’s cries for help and strangles Nina’s father with some piano wire. By banding together as ‘sisters’, Dot and Nina free themselves from their unhealthy attachment to their fathers, from the familial past that was haunting them. By attending to Nina’s calls for help, Dot finds that she can hear her own.

The Darkness(2016)

Director:Greg McLean

Cast:David Mazouz (Mikey), Radha Mitchell (Mother), Kevin Bacon (Father), Lucy Fry (Sister), Judith McConnell (Grandmother)

Meet autistic tween Mikey. While camping with his family in the Grand Canyon, he wanders off, falls into a cavern, and steals some sacred stones, bringing them back to Los Angeles in his backpack. At night in his house, he takes out the stones, fondles them, and places them in a strange formation in front of his bedroom wall, an act which invites demons to use the wall as a portal to invade the family home. Mikey’s inability to interact normally with his family led to his wandering off. His lack of safety awareness contributed to his fall. His obsessive focus on objects drew him to the stones, and his failure to understand society’s rules made it easier for him to steal. Finally, his interest in unusual patterns and his peculiar sensitivity to his surroundings led to the rock formations and contributed to making him a conduit for evil forces.

As Mikey’s parents ‘discover’ when they do some Internet research, ‘Autistic Kids Are Magnets for Ghosts’: ‘Unseen beings like autistic children. Because they process information and see the world differently, autistic children are more likely to see strange things. They often witness activities way before anyone else in the home. They are more sensitive to nuances.’33With this dubious information, combined with the tagline of ‘Evil comes home’, the film plays on the idea of an autistic child being a kind of alien in our midst – affectless, weirdly remote, and seemingly attuned to paranormal frequencies. A charitable interpretation of the film would view it as making fun of our fear that autistic kids are especially susceptible to evil spirits, but it’s hard not to see the movie as mired in old superstitions and misunderstandings about developmentally disabled people as being monstrous and threatening. When Mikey’s mother is startled by his sudden appearance behind her in the attic, the fact that autistic children are often silent is made to seem creepy and frightening. When Mikey’s father finds the walls and ceiling defaced with peculiar markings and sees Mikey smiling, the boy’s inappropriate affect appears like an enjoyment of evil. Mikey’s inability to recognise proper boundaries results in his spying on his sister in the shower and his leaving of strange handprints on her bed. Because he does not have our common awareness of danger, he sets the house on fire, and his lack of empathy leads him to kill his grandmother’s cat. The film does not promote a better understanding of autistic kids when it makes them seem like incipient perverts, budding pyromaniacs, or serial killers in the making. In the alternate ending to the film, Mikey’s repetitive behaviour and his obsession with numbers are linked to the evil spirits’ destruction of the entire family, as the boy’s counting turns out to be a countdown to their doom.

Fortunately, it is also possible to view this as a film about a family that scapegoats their autistic child, falsely accusing him as the cause of their own fears and tensions, until they learn better at the end. The foul odours, faucets that won’t turn off, and laundry rising in ghostly shapes speak to the mother’s fears of being a bad homemaker, though she blames them on Mikey. The father is an architect and so has a special dread of his house burning down – a fire he pins on Mikey. And when a dog somehow gets in and attacks the father’s precious daughter, he charges absent-minded Mikey with having left the front door open. The bulimic daughter is extremely body conscious, which could make her anxious about being spied on in the shower, and it is interesting how her fear of being choked by strange hands relates to the times when she forces herself to vomit by sticking her own finger down her throat. With these suggestions that the family is projecting their own fears and blame onto Mikey, the film approaches an awareness that this autistic child has simply served as a catalyst, not a cause, as the stress of dealing with his disability exacerbates already existing tensions in the other characters. The film moves away from the supernatural (autistic kids as channelling evil spirits) and towards a psychological understanding of disabled children and ‘demons’. If ‘they bring out the darkness within people so [that] their victims destroy themselves or destroy each other’, then this is because people scapegoat them as ‘evil others’ rather than recognising and solving their own problems. At the end of the film, Mikey’s autism proves to be an advantage because he alone can return the sacred stones and placate the demons since he is the only one who is not afraid of them. What this suggests is that, unlike his family, who fear others because they blame them for their own problems, Mikey has not been socialised into those prejudices and dreadful projections. He is fearless because he senses that there are no ‘others’ and there are no demons. There is only us.34

DOLLS

Annabelle(2014)

Director:John R Leonetti

Cast:Ward Horton (John), Annabelle Wallis (Mia), Tree O’Toole (Annabelle), Alfre Woodard (Evelyn)

In late 1960s California, John and Mia are a young couple in love, living in the ideal suburban home and expecting a beautiful baby. Named after actress Mia Farrow who played the pregnant mother inRosemary’s Baby(1968), the character of Mia is plagued by many of the same maternal anxieties, which form the nightmarish flipside to her dream of motherhood. Childbirth can be a moment of life or death, and Mia’s insistence that, if there is trouble during labour, the baby’s life be saved at the expense of her own indicates an underlying fear that either mother or child might ‘kill’ the other during delivery. Another cause for concern is that, no matter how hard parents try to be loving and protective of their children, the kids may grow up feeling deprived and resentful, like their neighbours’ teen daughter Annabelle who ran off to join a cult. Mia is also worried about her husband, John, who is completing med school and about to start his residency. Sometimes he is like the caring doctors she watches on the TV soap operaGeneral Hospital, but at other times his solicitude seems to be a false front hiding his selfish and overbearing nature. When John presents her with a vintage doll in a white wedding dress, Mia says that the last time he said he had a gift for her, she ended up pregnant, a comment which relates the creepy doll to the baby in her womb, implanted there by her husband. (InRosemary’s Baby, as the wife has sex with her husband on the night she conceives, she imagines that he is replaced by the Devil thrusting on top of her, impregnating her with his evil spawn.)

Mia’s mounting dread culminates in a scene where Annabelle, now a deranged cult member, joins forces with her Charles Manson-like boyfriend to kill her mother and then to invade Mia’s home to come after her. The assault by Annabelle combines Mia’s fear of being ‘killed’ by her baby during childbirth and her fear of being punished for her future failures as a parent by her grown-up daughter. When Annabelle’s boyfriend stabs Mia’s pregnant belly with a knife, the scene plays like a nightmarish version of intercourse with her husband, whose penetration of her implanted this baby that is causing her so much anxiety. Later, after the child is born, Mia will reach into the baby carriage only to be grabbed by the hand of an adult male demon, whose taloned fingers and phallic horns recall her fear of intercourse and inception. (In a real-life home invasion, members of the Charles Manson cult broke in and stabbed pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski, who had recently directedRosemary’s Baby.)

After grabbing the knife from her boyfriend but failing to kill Mia, Annabelle cuts her own throat, bleeding on the doll, which thus appears to be crying tears of blood. This ‘blood connection’ between Annabelle and the doll, which is also named Annabelle, worries Mia (who is played by actress Annabelle Wallis). After all, the teenage Annabelle was a ‘nightmare daughter’ who killed her mother, and a ‘nightmare mother’ who wanted to stab Mia in the womb. For these reasons, the doll becomes the locus of Mia’s maternal and filial fears, reminding her of her own ambivalence regarding her infant daughter. The life-sized, cherub-faced doll looks like the perfect baby girl, but something is subtly wrong, whether that be her too-perfect porcelain skin, the artificial blush on her cheeks, or her beautiful blue eyes, which never blink. It’s as though the doll is a creepy version of Mia’s baby girl, a projection of the mother’s fear that her daughter is less than ideal. Mia so wants the suburban dream that anything other than angelic perfection seems demonic. The devil doll’s staring eyes and mocking laughter disturb Mia, who begins to act like a bad mother due to fear of being under attack, putting flies in her baby’s milk bottle and overheating her bathwater (in deleted scenes). When Mia finds the doll in her daughter’s crib, she bashes the little impostor against the crib rails and throws her to the floor, only to discover her actual daughter lying there, which prompts Mia to weep at the thought that she might have killed her own infant (who is fortunately revealed to be unharmed).

After nearly becoming a homicidal mother, Mia swings to the opposite extreme and decides to commit suicide in order to save her daughter. But despite these fraught blood relations, the movie eventually seems to realise that no mother or daughter should have to die so that the other might live. To move beyond this hysterical view of a world consisting of self-sacrificial angels or selfish devils, the movie creates another character, Evelyn, who accidentally did kill her own daughter and who pays the price for that death by killing herself in order to save Mia’s baby girl. By acting out the two extremes of murder and self-martyrdom, Evelyn frees Mia to be a regular mother to her ordinary daughter, to have a mother-daughter relationship that isn’t perfect but is good enough.

The Boy(2016)

Director:William Brent Bell

Cast:Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), Ben Robson (Cole),James Russell (Brahms)