Postmodern Horror

This article finds in the found-footage horror cycle an alternative way of understanding the relationship between horror films and reality, which is usually discussed in terms of allegory. I propose the investigation of framing, considered both figuratively (framing the film as documentary) and stylistically (the framing in handheld cameras and in static long takes), as a device that playfully destabilizes the separation between the film and the surrounding world. The article’s main case study is the Paranormal Activity franchise, but examples are drawn from a variety of films.

This article verifies how Bryan Bertino’s 2008 film The Strangers articulates the slasher formula (CLOVER, 2015; DIKA, 1985) in order to tell a horror story that is in tune with the cultural context from the first decade of the 2000s in the United States. Drawing from analyses of the cultural impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, we point out evolutions in the slasher convention, including the dissidence from slasher films made to be deeply self-referential and campy. We also demonstrate how the recognizable structure is subverted to play with viewer expectations, potentializing its bleak and nihilistic ending, a narrative feature described by Pinedo (1996) as a postmodernist trend that breaks away from the classical horror structure.

Intro:

Fueled by the compulsion to both look and not look and conflating fear and repulsion with curiosity and attraction, horror thrives in creating spaces that are liminal and entropic. Often at play with its own tightly circumscribed generic structures, much of contemporary horror relies on the savvy exploitation of formulaic constructions and tropes. As if a direct response to these generic preoccupations, 2012’s The Cabin in the Woods directly addresses these categorical concerns. Written by longtime collaborators Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard and directed by Goddard, the film was ready for release in 2010 but was delayed for two years by the bankruptcy of MGM Studios, finally getting a theatrical release in 2012.  Goddard, a staff writer on Whedon’s TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, had also written the screenplay for the 2008 horror film Cloverfield, a cleverly staged hand-held camera POV monster film that was both a critical and box office hit. Within Whedon’s oeuvre, The Cabin in the Woods (hereafter Cabin) acts as a bridge between early work like Buffy and companion Angel and the later cynicism of Firefly and Dollhouse; as Erin Giannini argues in “‘Charybdis Tested Well with Teens’: The Cabin in the Woods as Metafictional Critique of Corporate Media Producers and Audiences,” the film “fits fairly easily between the ‘supernatural’ threats of early Whedon and the latter Whedon focus on man-made dangers.”

In Landscapes of Postmodernity, a group of young scholars link key concepts of postmodern thought to our present everyday experience in which we change our identities on a regular basis. While many of the essays look at less conventional modes of aesthetic representation – computer games, graphic novels, telenovelas, queer and animated films – others analyze more canonical works following less conventional approaches. Either way, the cultural and literary cartographies presented in this book allow America to be conceived as polymorphous and transnational, celebrating a new American self that is aware and proud of its non-Anglo-Saxon origins.