The Culture of Fear, Part 2: Horror Films in the 2000s

The horror genre’s first big box office breakthrough of the decade was Gore Verbinski’s remake The Ring (2002). That film’s success awakened mainstream American audiences to J-horror, a new wave of Japanese films about vengeful ghosts. The Ring has been followed by a slew of similar American remakes of Japanese ghost stories: The Grudge (2004), Dark Water (2005), The Ring 2 (2005), The Grudge 2 (2006), and Pulse (2006).

Writing on his blog in early 2005, John Kenneth Muir observed similarities between The Ring and The Grudge. In both films, he says, innocent people are victimized for being in the wrong place at the wrong time: the films “seem to suggest that ‘being there’ – the act of watching – is enough [to warrant punishment]. We don’t have to commit the atrocities we see on the tube ourselves to be held responsible for them.” His observation is that the films display no clear sense of karmic justice (as, for example, in the slasher films of the 1980s, where “sex + drugs = death”); the violence is haphazard and arbitrary. At most, the victims are guilty by association.

The notion of karmic justice was also absent from the “savage cinema” of the 1970s – films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), in which anyone could die at anytime for no reason at all. The universe in those films is ruled by chance and chaos, and the only way that the characters can survive is to ignore their civilized reason and resort to primitive instinct. I was certainly not the first person to write about these films as a reflection of Vietnam-era anxieties in America, and I am not the first person to point out the seeming significance of the fact that these films have recently been remade for a new generation as it faces a war with disturbing similarities to Vietnam.

Michael Bay’s big-budget remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made a killing at the box office in 2003, the same year that several other stylistic throwbacks cashed in. Witness Rob Zombie’s carnival-esque House of 1,000 Corpses (Roger Corman meets David Lynch), the Romero-revival 28 Days Later, Eli Roth’s Raimi-esque debut Cabin Fever, and would-B-movie Wrong Turn – a halfhearted mash-up of The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance. Since then, Michael Bay has produced the stomach-churning The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), as well as remakes of The Amityville Horror (original 1979, remake 2005) and The Hitcher (original 1986, remake 2007). He is currently working on a remake of Friday the 13th (1980). Rob Zombie made The Devil’s Rejects (2006), and recently shot a remake of Halloween (1979). Universal has distributed a high-profile remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (original 1978, remake 2005), plus Romero’s own Land of the Dead (2005) – not to mention an excellent spoof: Shaun of the Dead. In addition, we have the usual lot of franchise sequels, hardly worth listing here.

Horror’s newest mega-franchise was born in 2004. Saw, a gritty independent film about a sadistic contest for survival, is arguably the most distinct horror film of the decade. The villain of the film is the Jigsaw Killer, a puppet master who appears to take delight in the psychological anguish of ordinary people in excruciating circumstances. He doesn’t want to kill; he wants to watch. In fact, what distinguishes this killer more than anything is the fact that he never gets his hands dirty… he’s more like a “civilized” government leader, who gets foot soldiers to do his dirty work. Early in the film, Dr. Larry Gordon remarks – with a twinkle in his eye, suggesting that he slightly admires his captor – that Jigsaw is not “technically” a serial killer, because he never physically kills anyone.

Like Larry, we can’t help admiring the Jigsaw Killer’s ingenuity; and like him, we are genuinely curious to see what these characters are truly capable of. Will a man who recently attempted to kill himself be willing to force his way through a maze of barbed wire… in order to save his life? Will a scam artist cause himself to get burned alive, thereby suffering poetic revenge for “burning so many people”? Will a drug addict be willing to kill a fellow addict, then search through his intestines for a key that will prevent her head from exploding? Finally, will Dr. Larry Gordon – a surgeon who has taken the Hippocratic oath – be willing to kill a seemingly innocent young man, in order to rescue his own family? We can’t tear our eyes away from the screen… because we can’t help thinking about how we would react in the same situation.

Perhaps for that reason, some critics remarked that sitting through the film was comparable to being tortured. American audiences, however, were more than willing to play the role of voyeur – to the tune of 55 million dollars. Why? Maybe we’re testing ourselves. At the end of the film, we don’t want the Jigsaw Killer to get caught, anymore than we wanted Hannibal Lector to get caught for eating Ray Liota’s brain. Why? Jigsaw reminds us not to take what we have for granted; he makes us grateful to be alive and safe – watching this “game” from the comfort of our own homes. In the words of Amanda, the murderous drug addict who reappears in Saw 2: “He helped me.” This begs a tantalizing follow-up question: But at what cost?

Saw has already spawned two sequels, with the promise of another one on the way. It has also inspired a widespread passion for like-minded films – most notably Alexandre Aja’s High Tension (2003, released in the U.S. in 2005), Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005), and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2006). Most recently, Alexandre Aja’s remake of The Hills Have Eyes and its 2007 sequel, have claimed the throne. The goal of each of these films, it seems, is to push the onscreen violence a little bit further, testing the limitations of the characters as well as the audience: How much can we take? In the process, some of these films lose sight of the need for pathos, and become little more than a gore-filled endurance test. But this is par for the course. There have always been horror filmmakers with lesser imaginations, eager to follow the popular trends without fully understanding them. I submit that horror films on the whole are not getting becoming more “degenerate,” only wearing out a trend that is still timely for war-weary audiences.

To those who think that horror films of the 2000s are less intelligent than horror films of the past, I refer to seven years worth of comparatively traditional horror films: Ginger Snaps (Canada, 2000), The Gift (2000), The Bunker (England, 2001), The Others (2001), The Devil’s Backbone (Spain, 2001), Dark Water (Japan, 2001), May (2002), My Little Eye (England, 2002), The Mothman Prophecies (2002), 28 Days Later (England, 2003), Dead End (2003), Identity (2003), Marebito (Japan, 2004), Shutter (Korea, 2004), Land of the Dead (2005), Dark Water (2005), The Descent (England, 2006)… I’m sure there are many more that I’m neglecting to mention.

The last example, The Descent, gets right to the heart of this discussion about the subtext of recent horror films. I won’t give away the plot, but suffice it to say that the survivors are not only fighting to save themselves physically, but to save their human decency. Ultimately, that is the only thing that makes them different from the cave-dwelling creatures that are will kill them and eat them. How much are the characters willing to sacrifice in order to survive? That is the same dilemma faced by the would-be victims in The Hills Have Eyes (both versions), and by Dr. Gordon and Amanda in the Saw films… Like soldiers who must act without conscience in order to keep breathing, they choose to live. They are willing to go as far as they have to.

Afterwards, they face a new question of survival: After everything we’ve lost, can we ever go back?

The Culture of Fear, Part 1: The Cinema of Torture

In light of the fact that I wrote a book about the relationship between horror films and American pop culture, someone recently asked me what I think about the current spate of horror films that celebrate torture. I didn’t have the kind of ready-made answer that I could offer if they had asked me about previous decades in cinema history, because: (1) I have not written about horror films since I finished my book in 2003, and so my thoughts about recent horror films are relatively unfocused, and (2) It is not easy to get a grasp on pop culture without the advantage of hindsight. It only occurred to me (belatedly) in the last year or so that the “cinema of torture” is the defining trend in American horror films of the current decade. I believe it’s fair to conjecture that this has something to do with America’s current political climate, which can be summed up in one word: frustrated.

For Americans, the current war began on 9/11 – a wake-up call so surreal that, at the time, most of us could only compare it to a movie. I was one of the many people who watched the events unfold on television, and remained dumbstruck for days afterward. Soon after, shock turned to mourning, mourning turned to anger. The Bush administration answered the people’s call for action by invading Iraq in the spring of 2003. At the time, the nation had a clear goal: to eradicate the pervasive threat of terrorism at its most accessible source – a country that supported known terrorists. This was the beginning of “the war on terror,” a worldwide effort to root out the Evil of terrorism before it could spread.

Flash forward four years. The war on terror has become a desperate effort to maintain order in a foreign country, where acts of terrorism are more common than ever. The U.S. government now practically stands alone in this once-heroic effort. The American people are conflicted about what to do: stay the course or admit defeat? We do not like to admit defeat.

Perhaps this explains our cinema’s obsession with torture – our entertainment is not just reminding us of specific atrocities of war, like the events at Abu Ghraib… it is also reminding us that torture is the last resort of a person, or a country, that is willing to sacrifice human rights to achieve their goal. By any means necessary.

A few years ago, I read a very good book on America’s foreign policy during the Vietnam War. The author, a professor at a well-known university, wrote the book after one of his students expressed the belief that we only lost the Vietnam War because the American government wasn’t completely committed to the cause. The United States, he figured, couldn’t possibly have lost a war against a tiny third-world country, unless it simply didn’t try hard enough. After further discussion, the professor realized that his student’s knowledge of the Vietnam War was based largely on the film Rambo: First Blood, Part II, in which Sylvester Stallone single-handedly wins the Vietnam War through sheer rage. (It is worth noting that, in the months after 9/11, Stallone announced that he was working on a script for a new Rambo sequel.) Nowadays, we might simply send Jack Bauer to sort things out behind closed doors.

Which brings me to my big question: How many Americans are desperate to win the current war at any cost? How many of us are willing to dispense with any and all measures of restraint? The terrorists are merciless, we say, and so we must be equally merciless. Our administration calls the terrorists Evil – the implication being that they are beyond reason, and can only be dealt with in one way. This is the end result of the “culture of fear”: from shock to mourning to anger to inhumanity.

We still have not recovered from the blow that started us down this path. The “war on terror” is still linked, in the popular consciousness, with 9/11. We are still afraid of what happened that day. Those of us who were not in New York are afraid to think of what it would have been like if we ourselves had been there, experiencing the horror first-hand instead of watching it on TV. We are afraid that it could have been us, afraid that it could be us next time.

When we look beyond our pain and our anger, we understand that if we are willing to torture anyone, anyplace, anytime in order to achieve our goals, then we MUST be psychologically prepared for the possibility that we could be subjected to the same merciless treatment ourselves. Any place, any time. It is not an easy thing to cope with that kind of fear… much easier to see it played out on the big screen, in a movie that we know will end in roughly 90 minutes.

Tropical Terrace

On Wednesday, my computer crashed -- hardware failure. I lost about three weeks worth of work, and had to wait for Dell to replace my hard drive before I could even make a damage assessment.

This situation forced me out of the house yesterday. I drove to Malibu, and went hiking in Solstice Canyon. In the 1950s, African-American architect Paul Williams designed a house there for the Fred Roberts family. The house incorporated many elements of the rural setting: rocks, trees, waterfalls and a meandering stream. In 1982, the house burned down and, since 1988, the remains have been a popular destination for hikers.

The easiest way to get to the ruins is by walking up the old driveway, which runs parallel to the river at the base of canyon. I was surprised at how lush and green the area was, and how quiet.






















Perhaps the most striking thing about this site is a pair of structures on the west side of the river, opposite the house. On one hill stands this miniature stone temple. Opposite, there is a shrine to the Virgin Mary.