Deconstructing the horror film, one scream at a time.
AS HORROR FILMMAKERS AVOID THE REPUTATION OF THEIR OWN GENRE, GREAT TRASH FALLS BY WAYSIDE
The late George A. Romero, our most esteemed horror auteur, maintained to the moment he died that his seminal first feature, Night of the Living Dead, was not an allegory. It was a low-budget, independent creature-feature about zombies: any cryptic import or highbrow symbolism was strictly incidental, or else projected by scholars keen on deep reading. He had not intended to make a parable about the war in Vietnam; he had certainly never meant to make a movie about race, despite the fact that the movie’s black hero, having survived the siege of undead, is fatally gunned down in the closing minutes by a posse of trigger-happy redneck vigilantes. “That stuff was not deliberate,” Romero said in 2015. “It wasn’t discussed. It wasn’t meant to be an issue. We honestly never picked up on it at all.”
No sensible filmmaker in 2018 would be so modest. Indeed, it has become the norm of late for any director who deigns to slump to so lowly a style as horror to expressly distance themselves from the genre: horror is disreputable — and where that used to be precisely the attraction, it now seems a very compelling reason to stay away.
Most directors would prefer to be reputable. “I was kind of careful never to really call it a horror film,” director Ari Aster has said about Hereditary, a horror film. “I would describe it as a family tragedy that curdles into a nightmare.” A morbid slasher rife with satanic rituals and graphic decapitations sounds vulgar. But a family tragedy? Serious stuff, one is assured, insulted from filth by prestige.
Prestige is a precious thing, and filmmakers are eager to cultivate it. So too are the studios and distributors who bankroll them, which may be why marketing materials commonly emphasize the solemnity of horror films alongside their blood and gore. New York’s wildly successful upstart A24 has done very well with its slate of solemn, sophisticated horror fare: both The Witch and It Comes At Night were sold as scary movies for the discerning; genre pictures for an audience that considers itself above another Conjuring or Paranormal Activity. We even have a shorthand for this brand: “Elevated Horror,” a suddenly ubiquitous epithet meant to distinguish the major from the merely macabre.
Horror is the domain of jump scares and cheap thrills. Elevated Horror, ever lofty, cares more menace and dread.
“In the last few years there have been some of the best movies period with these amazing Elevated Horror movies,” John Krasinski proclaimed earlier this year, after the enormous commercial and critical success of the film he directed and starred in, A Quiet Place. He was referring to a number of similarly selfstyled highbrow thrillers that, in both disposition and acclaim, are his film’s contemporaries: The Babadook, It Follows, Get Out. These movies were judged effective not simply for unsettling or establishing an ominous mood; more crucially, they seemed to articulate something meaningful about the world, to develop themes with conspicuous social or political substance. A Quiet Place is about family; Hereditary is about inherited trauma; Get Out — more overtly than Night of the Living Dead — is about race. These messages are not supplementary or coincidental. They are the essence, and the point.
Horror as social metaphor is not new. And directors of notably prestigious horror films have been eager to draw a distinction between their venerable work and the unsavoury connotations of the label before: William Friedkin was claiming as recently as 2015 that with The Exorcist he “didn’t set out to make a horror film,” and that he believed rather “it was a film about the mystery of faith.”
What is new is the landscape of criticism and commentary that privileges just these sorts of messages and themes. Elevated Horror lends itself supremely well to the era of the think-piece and What It All Means exegesis. Social media, moreover, is uniquely suited to parse any movie that has been calibrated exactly to stoke debate. It isn’t just that horror movies more often contain messages today. It’s also that the entire apparatus of contemporary criticism is primed to discuss them.
A message does not preclude baser thrills. And most examples of Elevated Horror continue to frighten in and around the margins of their grandiose goals: Hereditary is frequently terrifying, as my sweat-soaked palms and much-gripped armrests attest, and anyone who saw Get Out with a crowd knows its pleasures are more than merely intellectual. But Elevated Horror heralds a shift in priorities toward the legitimate and respectable. And the legitimate and respectable are inconsistent with an attitude that for almost the entire history of cinema has been horror’s métier: the shameless, unapologetic embrace of trash.
Once upon a time horror movies aspired to disturb, intimidate, outrage, anger, disgust. They defied taste; they broached taboos; they transgressed. They did not seek praise or the approval of a dignified audience. An Elevated Horror movie might make you think. Could it shock you? Ruin your day? Cause you to throw up?
In Jim Muro’s underseen cult classic Street Trash, from 1987, Brooklyn’s belligerent, boisterous homeless population is beset by the arrival of a libation called Viper — a mickey of booze that would be a steal for a buck, if it didn’t cause anyone who drinks even a mouthful of the stuff to melt into a slick of lurid goo. Melt they extravagantly do, one after another, in sequences that scandalize and excite in equal measure: scandalize because it’s so distasteful, excite because it’s so willing to be. Our modern temptation is to discern in the muck and ooze some flicker of social consciousness, to locate in this crass display a sign that the indecency we’re enjoying is for some higher purpose. Is it a satire about our indifference to the fate of the urban poor? A righteous parody of screen violence?
Yet the film resists even the most generous effort to suss out a moral. As burlesque, it is too extreme to be agreeably comic. However upbeat its energy, what it revels in is often nightmarishly repugnant. (You name it: gang rape, necrophilia, castration.) As aggressive Paul Verhoeven-ish satire, the tone is too light, too frivolous to bear the weight of critical self-interrogation. Street Trash just doesn’t work like that. You can’t easily reconcile its obscene violence and crude humour with the kind of grand, serious theme that would make such indulgences acceptable. It doesn’t afford you the sort of explanations whose gravity justifies content that would otherwise offend. It’s just outrageous and appalling and really, really gross. As it happens, that’s plenty. Who wants a lecture when you can watch a bunch of hobos melt?
TERROR OF SCENARIO AND THE IMMEDIACY OF THE STYLE.
Street Trash wouldn’t fly today. Too vile and, more egregious for the commentariat, too problematic. But it is perhaps purity rather than depravity that makes the movie seem so special from the present vantage. The purity of making “just” a genre film, absent any more pompous or high-minded goal. The simple pleasures of thrilling, delighting, or even offending people are good enough objectives for a filmmaker; even if, in this era of highbrow elevation, it is easy to forget that we’re supposed to go to horror movies to be scared. Horror by tradition expresses our unconscious fears, and has the capacity to tap into anxieties and concerns even the people who make them are not aware they have. The Elevated model begins with the thesis, and is intent on some Important Theme. Heavy with meaning, bloated with a message and a point, they have no room left for the accidental stuff that really scares.
What is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre about? Certainly its arrangement of villains and heroes amid the squalor of the countryside slaughterhouse poses questions of, to take one prominent example, class. But it is safe to say that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not an allegory, or at least not overtly, incontrovertibly so. What ideas it contains come through spontaneously and organically: they are secondary to what matters, which is the terror of the scenario and the immediacy of the style.
Like Romero, Tobe Hooper didn’t bother getting bogged down by symbols or lessons; his interests were primal and elemental, and the result is one of the most extraordinary and enduring of all horror movies. The film would not be improved if Leatherface were a metaphor. In fact, it would be greatly diminished. What it would gain in theme, in an easily expressible message to brandish, it would lose in visceral power.