The new horror, the new horror

In the seventies and the eighties the American directors of the horror and the psychological thriller film moved away from the freewheeling optimism of the sixties and the existential haplessness of the fifties. In the fifties the greatest enemy had been Communism and McCarthyism; in the sixties that enemy, for some time at least, had been the devil. When Vietnam came and went, when Nixon almost became the second president in his country’s history to be impeached, we moved that enemy from the depths of hell to the depths of our souls and minds. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist wasn’t really about the devil, any more than it was about that timeless, endless battle between the self and contemporary, self-alienating, self-repelling psychology.

Not long afterwards we got movies that varied on this troubling dichotomy between who we wanted to be and what our culture wanted us to be. So in came The Stepford Wives and The Fury and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the latter of which was a remake of the 1956 B film that preyed on the fear of Communism and anti-Communism, which substituted for that fear the contemporary distaste for groupthink, or the inability to feel beyond what one’s community wanted one to feel.

I sometimes wonder, now and then, whether we’re returning to the seventies.

Just recently I had the good fortune of watching eight extraordinary horror films, all from 2015 to 2017: The Gift, The Invitation, Hush, Lights Out, Ouija: Origin of Evil, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Split, Get Out. The themes they engender are different, sometimes wildly so. But broadly speaking they belong to the same genre: psychological horror. The interest they compel doesn’t come out from just that, of course, because if it did I wouldn’t consider them extraordinary, only exceptional. For me, therefore, they signal a new avenue for the American cinema. Almost all of them have been box-office hits (Get Out, according to Box Office Mojo, has earned more than 50 times its 4.5 million dollar budget). They are to our time what The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives were to the seventies, because formally and aesthetically they take on contemporary themes and remould their genre.

Had Brian De Palma directed Carrie in the fifties, he would have taken in the then rampant fears of the supernatural, the out-there and unknown, which would have overwhelmed the contemporary responses to female sexuality and bullying that he put into it. Films are obviously the era they are made in, and probably in no other genre has this been truer than horror, simply because that the horror film doesn’t just reflect but also reshapes our fears. Long before Bryan Singer brought The X-Men to the screen, De Palma (with The Fury) and David Cronenberg (with Scanners) depicted our tense fears of the alien living among us through that genre.

Sometimes these movies predate their later treatments in other genres, The Fury and Scanners being two examples. Sometimes they rework earlier movies, earlier tropes. All those eight films I’ve mentioned at the beginning, from The Gift to Get Out, fall under the latter category: they are all rehashed and very often witty takes on taken-for-granted movie conventions. The Gift, for instance, subtly plays around with Fatal Attraction, with the obsessive, spurned Alex Forrest figure now turned into an obsessive, abused male figure (played by the director of the film, Joel Edgerton).

The ending, a letdown for some, was for me the vindication of the story: from the beginning it get us to imagine anomalies that are not really there, then makes us indifferently throw them away, before the climax, where we are told that what we threw away was not what we were imagining or fantasising. In other words, earlier the convention was to ridicule our paranoia early on and then have a central character vindicate it; reworked and contorted, the convention now seems to be to never let that sense of paranoia leave us, because no character can vindicate it. We are with the protagonist, and we are as clueless and hapless as he or she is. The film is its own vindication, the climax its own fall or ascent. It’s not the kind of twist ending one sees in, say, Planet of the Apes or M. Night Shyamalan’s films, because these are not conventional twist endings. 10 Cloverfield Lane ends on a rather ironic note, because it vindicates both the lewd antagonist’s (John Goodman) fears and the protagonist’s (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) lack of confidence about the world outside. That sense of irony underscores the other seven films as well.

Is it a coincidence that many of the biggest big budget box-office takers in the genre in recent years – The Conjuring, Annabelle, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimensions, Ouija – have been either remakes or recycled variations of earlier films? Joe Bishara’s eerie score for The Conjuring is a throwback to the supernatural horror movies of the sixties, with its spine-tingling, flutter-tonguing effects. The Conjuring is, to be sure, an effective package, but in every other case, especially with the feeble remakes of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, the results have been lukewarm at best, terrible at worst. “It's the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture's gone limp” is how the Village Voice sums up the new Poltergeist, and I agree. Audiences and critics are yearning for new ways of being scared. My guess is that they are getting what they clamoured for.

These movies belong to the Big Budget format that Hollywood is known for. But consider those eight other films. Some of them were financed as independent flicks (The Gift, The Invitation), and nearly all of them were directed by cineastes who began as independent filmmakers or scriptwriters (Edgerton, Mike Flanagan, David Sandberg, Jordan Peele). Flanagan is the most flamboyant of them. I recently asked a bunch of zealous cinephiles on Facebook as to what they thought of this Salem-born director, and their response was, “He’s middle-of-the-road.” What they mean, obviously, is that he is an experimenter who tweaks conventions, which is true: Absentia, his debut, is a wickedly horrifying take on pregnancy, while Ouija: Origin of Evil takes the shaky premise of the earlier Ouija (a mishmash of slasher and supernatural horror) and turned it into something more: a new Exorcist, the first true spiritual successor to the 1973 classic that’s endured so many terrible remakes.

Focused on the within rather than the without, the contemporary horror and psychological thriller film borrows from, and improves on, the theme it depicts and shares with its counterpart from not only the seventies, but also the fifties: the fear of being depersonalised. The Negro servants in Get Out, for example, are a reminder of the wives from Stepford Wives and the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Get Out of course doesn’t belong to a set genre: it defies our own expectations of what category it belongs to. The trope of the Negro boyfriend meeting his white girlfriend’s family is a throwback to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and for the first hour or so, we are made to feel that the hostility of Missy (the black maid) towards our hero, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), is reminiscent of the hostility of Tillie, the black maid from that earlier classic, towards John Prentice. In other words, it’s a genre-redefiner, perhaps the most idiosyncratic since Cabin in the Woods.

In Lights Out and Ouija: Origin of Evil, fear is externalised. This is another variation of the sci-fi themes of the fifties and seventies, with supernatural entities substituting for aliens. But nearly half the plot takes place in a house: Lights Out in the mother’s, Ouija: Origin of Evil in Alice Zander’s. I am not inclined to consider this a coincidence, particularly when the climaxes in both stories unfold in the dark, shut out from the rest of the world. In the typical fifties horror and sci-fi flick the world outside knew what was happening; now the trauma is being shut in, individualised, felt only by the protagonists until the end. (Ouija: Origin of Evil ends with a jump-cut to a doctor interrogating the sole survivor of the exorcism in the basement.)

The same can be said of The Gift and The Invitation. Despite the opened out, expansive architecture of the house in The Gift, we see the world outside in glimpses: most of the time our characters are inside, constricted to the point of paranoia. Moreover we don’t see their climaxes until the last few moments. 10 Cloverfield Lane devotes only its last 15 minutes to the fight between the protagonist, Michelle, and the alien biomechanical spaceship. Part of the reason for this is, of course, the budget. But small budgets can deliver in ways big digitalised superhero fantasies can’t. The twists in Lights Out, Get Out, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Split are invigorated by sparingly used effects to evoke a sense of raw, unfiltered terror.

Perhaps I should mention in passing (and as a final point) that these movies can be taken as acts of homage to other movies, since they borrow tropes from the genres they belong to. Sometimes these allusions are discernible, often they are not. While The Gift quite clearly borrows from Fatal Attraction, for instance, it’s not as easy to claim that Get Out is a revisionist look at the interracial love stories of the sixties and The Invitation a reworking of the conventional but overwrought dinner party thrillers that Jennifer’s Body, The Perfect Host, and Truth or Die were. By showing us the clichés of these movies, remnants of an earlier era, and repudiating them, these eight extraordinary films are, I believe, nightmarish in the best sense of the term, because they are not away from the reality we occupy, but rather closer to it.

Written for: Ceylon Today LITE, September 3 2017