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The most common criticism levelled against the horror genre--and the most inaccurate--is that it's 'empty calories.' It rarely contains social commentary or depth, at best it's just bugs on strings and cats jumping from shadowy corners, and at worst it's sex, blood and gore.
So, so wrong. To get under our skin, horror almost has to include social commentary, in order to touch on what really unnerves us.
For example, put Dracula in context: England's growing population of Eastern European immigrants, increasingly vocal suffragettes and feminists, and homosexuality something of an open secret. Who was Dracula meant to frighten? Figure that out and suddenly it's no mystery why vampires became romantic heroes in later fiction, and why young women so eagerly embrace the monster.
If you find the Other and identify the story's ideal audience, you can start to tug loose the threads of social commentary.
Zombie tales often comment on mob mentality, the evils of authority, how we dehumanize each other and how easy it is to do, once we've demonized and dehumanized the Other. In Night of the Living Dead, audiences were put into the black hero's shoes as he survived the mindless masses out to tear him apart, only to be killed by a posse of rednecks led by cops, in imagery that would have clearly screamed of lynchings to viewers in 1968.
Our vague sense of 'genre' doesn't help. Some genres are defined by setting, others by tone, and still others by frustratingly vague stylistic elements. (Damn you, noir!) Atomic age science fiction was often just horror wearing a spacesuit and reflecting the era's paranoia about a looming army of the Other with advanced technology just waiting to invade, or worse yet, already here.Invasion of the Body Snatchers might have been a prequel to Red Dawn.
At times you'd think the satire was so thick it'd be unmistakable, but someone still manages to boldly Not Get It. The Stepford Wives was a feminist horror film pointing out the oppressive homogenization that takes place in suburbia, and the mid-century American dream that tried to drag women back out of the workforce and quash them into brainless kitchenbound housebots. The ultimate threat wasn't simply replacement: it was that, no matter how liberal and supportive your husband seemed, secretly he just wanted you to shut up and be a good little housewife.
The sequels are hard to watch and easy to forget (did you even know there were sequels? I rest my case!), except for the sheer creepiness of The Stepford Husbands. Where the original story had women turned into what men wanted (housebots) and the heroine tried to escape after her husband set her up for assimilation, The Stepford Husbands showed men turned into what women wanted (listeners), and the heroinestand by her man had to save her man after someone else set him up. Oh, yeah, and the men became violently aggressive and killed their spouses as a pesky side effect of the 'treatment.' So, who was the target audience for that one?
So, who is the ideal audience for The Exorcist? Who will it most scare? What about it really unnerves us? If you answered 'the religious' or 'the Devil,' you're wrong. Oh, sure, it scared the bejeebus out of the religious, but that's hardly the point. Both of the demon's victims, both Regan and Father Damien, were introduced to us as someone's child. Both adults, Father Damien and Regan's mother Chris, were attacked through the mother-child relationship, through their sense of guilt and weakness. Intertwined behind the possession in The Exorcist are two stories of abandonment and loneliness, of mothers and children.
It was no coincidence that the girl talked to the Ouija board and the old woman to the radio, or that the girl had a deadbeat father who never called and the woman a deadbeat son who rarely visited. It was also no coincidence that Karras is first heard describing himself as a fraud, and Chris is an actress, or that both had a turn insisting that thing was not their loved one. The atheist mother sat with the child through the medical tests, and when that failed, the religious Father sat with her through the spiritual exorcism.
And when that failed? He smacked the evil out of the kid. Yep, she got the Fatherly attention she deserved, he got absolution, and if it weren't for the body count, it could be a happy ending. But I think I've wandered away from the point...
So, so wrong. To get under our skin, horror almost has to include social commentary, in order to touch on what really unnerves us.
For example, put Dracula in context: England's growing population of Eastern European immigrants, increasingly vocal suffragettes and feminists, and homosexuality something of an open secret. Who was Dracula meant to frighten? Figure that out and suddenly it's no mystery why vampires became romantic heroes in later fiction, and why young women so eagerly embrace the monster.
If you find the Other and identify the story's ideal audience, you can start to tug loose the threads of social commentary.
Zombie tales often comment on mob mentality, the evils of authority, how we dehumanize each other and how easy it is to do, once we've demonized and dehumanized the Other. In Night of the Living Dead, audiences were put into the black hero's shoes as he survived the mindless masses out to tear him apart, only to be killed by a posse of rednecks led by cops, in imagery that would have clearly screamed of lynchings to viewers in 1968.
Our vague sense of 'genre' doesn't help. Some genres are defined by setting, others by tone, and still others by frustratingly vague stylistic elements. (Damn you, noir!) Atomic age science fiction was often just horror wearing a spacesuit and reflecting the era's paranoia about a looming army of the Other with advanced technology just waiting to invade, or worse yet, already here.Invasion of the Body Snatchers might have been a prequel to Red Dawn.
At times you'd think the satire was so thick it'd be unmistakable, but someone still manages to boldly Not Get It. The Stepford Wives was a feminist horror film pointing out the oppressive homogenization that takes place in suburbia, and the mid-century American dream that tried to drag women back out of the workforce and quash them into brainless kitchenbound housebots. The ultimate threat wasn't simply replacement: it was that, no matter how liberal and supportive your husband seemed, secretly he just wanted you to shut up and be a good little housewife.
The sequels are hard to watch and easy to forget (did you even know there were sequels? I rest my case!), except for the sheer creepiness of The Stepford Husbands. Where the original story had women turned into what men wanted (housebots) and the heroine tried to escape after her husband set her up for assimilation, The Stepford Husbands showed men turned into what women wanted (listeners), and the heroine
So, who is the ideal audience for The Exorcist? Who will it most scare? What about it really unnerves us? If you answered 'the religious' or 'the Devil,' you're wrong. Oh, sure, it scared the bejeebus out of the religious, but that's hardly the point. Both of the demon's victims, both Regan and Father Damien, were introduced to us as someone's child. Both adults, Father Damien and Regan's mother Chris, were attacked through the mother-child relationship, through their sense of guilt and weakness. Intertwined behind the possession in The Exorcist are two stories of abandonment and loneliness, of mothers and children.
It was no coincidence that the girl talked to the Ouija board and the old woman to the radio, or that the girl had a deadbeat father who never called and the woman a deadbeat son who rarely visited. It was also no coincidence that Karras is first heard describing himself as a fraud, and Chris is an actress, or that both had a turn insisting that thing was not their loved one. The atheist mother sat with the child through the medical tests, and when that failed, the religious Father sat with her through the spiritual exorcism.
And when that failed? He smacked the evil out of the kid. Yep, she got the Fatherly attention she deserved, he got absolution, and if it weren't for the body count, it could be a happy ending. But I think I've wandered away from the point...
