7.5–Spotlight on The Horror Film

We can now put some of our film knowledge into practice by examining a selected movie. Prepare yourselves; we are taking a trip into horror. We’ll take a look at the genre, an influential director’s mini-biography, consider study questions for the film, and read a sample student essay.

Dark elements of folk and fairy tales from the oral tradition of storytelling became early Gothic literature and theatrical performances of the Grand Guignol;; horror—before it was classified as such—developed into a genre focusing on the grotesque, sensational, bizarre, and terror elements that connect its audience to an overall sense of fear and dread.

Representative texts include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), John Polodori’s The Vampyre (1819), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), all of which were later adapted into films. These written works and their complements featured monsters (werewolves, vampires, ghosts, witches, and demons), unexplainable phenomenon, and things that went bump in the night to frighten characters. Over time, 20th-century authors gained recognition for their works contributing to the world of horror fiction: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker (all listed authors have had works adapted into film). Along with these writers of adult fiction, children’s literature and young-adult fiction authors such as Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl, Mary Downing Hahn, Christopher Pike, and R.L. Stine published material for younger audiences that linked to the horror genre. Contemporary horror fiction is more overt in its genre elements, but from Walpole’s Otranto to Bloch’s Psycho (1959), the foundation formed and continues to develop over 255 years later.

Film productions had a similar growth pattern; they exhibited early Gothic elements that became more formative for horror as its own category. One of the earliest productions, Georges Méliès’ Le Manoir du diable (1896), is categorized as horror much like Otranto because of its story elements being connected to the supernatural: the appearance of a devil figure, a bat transformation, a skeleton, a cauldron, and use of a crucifix to vanquish the devil. The early Gothic writings were adapted into films not long after, as previously mentioned, and the horror-movie industry grew from the creation of original stories. As the movies proliferated with international influence and development, so did the natural need to further categorize them, most often in the form of hybrid-genre combinations: body horror, psychological horror, found-footage, sci-fi horror, the slasher, comedic horror, horror romance (yes, that exists), supernatural horror, and the creature feature to name a few popular categories. Modern filmmakers in Italian and American cinema—Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Alfred Hitchcock, Herschell Gordon Lewis, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, John Landis, Mary Lambert, David Cronenberg—became household names for their explorations of witches, the human psyche, the afterlife, blood and gore, and transformation. Contemporary and up-and-coming directors—Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Takashi Miike, Jennifer Kent, Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Nia DaCosta—carry on that tradition in films that address disease, revenge, grief, race, and trauma. Though the genre is far too varied to cover all of its creators and their work, a brief list that encompasses the subgenre categories above in bold includes (same order): Tom Six’s The Human Centipede: First Sequence (2009), Kent’s The Babadook (2014), Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), Amy Holden Jones’ The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), David Gebroe’s Zombie Honeymoon (2004), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield (2008). Horror has a home on the small screen, as well, with contemporary anthology series like Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story (2011), Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020), and Little Marvin’s Them (2021).

But out of all the film genres, why spotlight horror? Why do we like it? Why do we hate it? Why does it continue to develop as a genre? Horror—in all of its simultaneous grandeur of excess and subtlety—relates to audiences because it taps into and exposes our shared social anxieties, cultural terrors, and all things that unnerve and disrupt normative systems. We like it because we can make connections to the content, and that helps us work through our own real-life problems. We hate it because we can make connections to the content, and that scares us to the core of our existence. It continues to develop as a genre because humanity has no boundary or endgame on dread; we are constantly in varying states of worry, concern, fear, anxiety, and terror about the smallest of things (Did my package from Amazon arrive yet?) to global thoughts (What will happen when that new law is passed?). From monsters to human villains and unexplainable phenomenon, horror’s scary elements and fear tactics are typically metaphors and symbols that make connections between the films and its willing and/or reluctant audience members. We spotlight horror for these reasons and the simple fact that it is the most synthesized genre, combining elements from all cinema which makes it an interesting category to investigate. At any given moment watching a horror film, the viewer might find themself cowering in fear, laughing at absurdity, turning away in disgust, crying at the loss of a beloved character (human or animal), sighing in relief after a suspenseful moment, and even smiling or clapping from a demonstration of love and strength to overcome the impossible.

One staple of horror is the zombie movie, and there may be no better person to complete our focus on the genre than George A. Romero.

Biography: George A. Romero (1940–2017)

George Romero was regarded as a master of the horror genre, particularly as a pioneer of zombie cinema. His influential undead series started with his directorial debut, Night of the Living Dead (1968), and continued with five sequels before his death: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009). The director, who co-wrote the screenplay with John A. Russo, never used the word “zombie” in the film, but it was clear that his undead ghouls helped establish the subgenre, particularly for their slow-moving pace and mindless cravings for human flesh; developments in the subgenre—the zombie that only eats brains, the running zombie, the talking zombie, the infection/contagion horror film, etc.—came later. We can see the influence of Romero’s work in contemporary productions such as: 28 Days Later (2002), Zombieland (2009), Warm Bodies (2013), World War Z (2013), The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), Train to Busan (2016), and the ever-developing The Walking Dead franchise which started as a comic book series in 2003 and was adapted to television in 2010. Although Romero directed other films in the genre, he is most known for the undead series as critics note how the films help chronicle American consumerism, capitalism, race relations, class systems, and other socioeconomic concerns of the nation. Outside of horror, Romero directed a romantic comedy (There’s Always Vanilla [1971]) and a thriller (The Amusement Park [1973]), the latter which was considered lost and only recently acquired in 2021 for distribution to stream on Shudder, the Netflix of horror; these films focus on topics involving interpersonal relationships, time and aging, and mental degradation, everyday human concerns that also became a part of his horror films’ subject matter. In a broader sense, this is just one way we can understand film as an archive of history; its fictitious content highlights real-word happenings.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

In Romero’s first feature-length film, a group of strangers must work together to survive a night in a random farmhouse as they fight off an uprising of the dead. After watching the film, decide if you like it or not and why. This is the first step in responding to almost any film, but after the initial viewing of Night of the Living Dead, our attention can turn to a more critical film analysis of its form and content. The next section offers questions to help focus analysis, and then we will review—through annotation—one student’s close reading of the film.^[1]