HORRORS!

—by Marilyn Davis

Even if you don't go to see horror films—even if you avoid them like the plague—you can't escape them entirely. Images from the classics and the less-than-classics pervade our cultural landscape.

The shower scene from Psycho. The hand of Frankenstein's monster stirring as he comes to life. Jason's mask; Freddy Krueger's metal fingers. Zombies. Giant ants and killer plants. Linda Blair's head spinning in The Exorcist. Hannibal Lecter. "He-e-e-e-re's Johnny!"

It may be more apropos to say that our culture pervades our horror films. Whether they focus on the supernatural, the psychotic, or a mix of both, these movies play on our repressed fears and social anxieties to give us a good scare—a taste that cuts across cultures, by the way. "Horror has always been a very popular international genre," says Tony Williams, a professor of film studies in the English Department who has written extensively about horror films.

Perhaps the earliest such films that most Americans are familiar with are the famed monster movies made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s. Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man —these creatures were stand-ins for our fear of what was foreign, Williams says, and the films were set in distant locales like Eastern Europe and Egypt. "Bela Lugosi was the archetypal foreigner, with his thick Hungarian accent—a far cry from Norman Perkins in Psycho," Williams points out.

During the 1950s, mutant-monster movies and sci-fi thrillers expressed our fear of the nuclear threat and the Cold War. In Japanese film, of course, Godzilla was born as a result of the atom bomb, while in the United States horror features were fraught with aliens and mutant insects.

But in the 1960s, American horror film directors moved from a focus on the threats outside us to the threats within. In Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), Williams analyzed scores of movies—and reviewed the writings of scores of critics—to make his case that movie horror is usually a reflection or outgrowth of repressive, dysfunctional families. These films, he says, embody the "inevitable psychological tensions of an authoritarian family situation, in which people are molded into certain roles."

To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the monster, and he is us."

Even in films like the Frankenstein series, Williams notes, family motifs come into play. But in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock created the definitive family horror film with the groundbreaking Psycho, where derangement and murder result from an unnatural mother/son relationship. Ever since Psycho, most American horror films have been set right here at home, and family disturbances are overt. Monstrous mothers, tyrannical fathers, demon-driven children, brutalized children who grow up to be serial killers—we've seen it all. What intrigues Williams about horror films is how they "reveal aspects of the psyche people prefer to leave concealed" and how they directly or indirectly illuminate the dark side of society. Most of us are powerless to oppose social norms; horror films allow our ambivalence a little vicarious expression in the form of stalkers and monsters, the possessed and the dispossessed.

"It's not all about gore and special effects," Williams says. "In fact, that's what I object to in the Elm Street and Friday the 13th films, the gratuitous violence. The best horror films are those which have an interesting balance between excess and social commentary."

Those often are low-budget or independent films, he says: "Directors working outside the studio system have much more opportunity to be critical of society," not to mention more freedom of self-expression. These films cut closer to the bone, if you will.

Williams has published books about two directors in this category, George Romero and Larry Cohen. Romero's zombie films, he says, are "metaphors for the decay of society." Romero's first, Night of the Living Dead (1968), broke new ground in graphicness, but also "looked at the divided state of America in the Vietnam era. There was an underlying social message: people cannot unite against the zombies because they're already divided, by race and gender and other things." In later films like Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead, Romero satirized consumer consumption and political conservatism.

It's Alive!, directed by Larry Cohen, is even more direct in its message. In this movie, a couple's new baby turns out to be a horrifying mutant, leading to efforts by the authorities to kill it. It's Alive! "showed the monster in the family as the embodiment of the father's insecurities," Williams says. The baby is not inherently dangerous; its savagery is triggered only in self-defense. In what Williams calls "one of the great, poignant moments in horror cinema," the father ultimately accepts his child as it is and tries to shield it from a final attack by the police, but fails.

It's Alive! and the movie's two sequels stand the typical horror film formula on its head. "The need is to protect the monster from society, instead of protecting society from the monster," Williams says. "Accepting differences is what these films by Cohen are about. Cohen is one of the great imaginative talents in American cinema today, and he uses horror or fantasy—he doesn't like the term horror—to critique the state of American society."

By no means are social messages part and parcel of all horror films. "You won't find them in average horror films, which are gratuitous by their very nature," says Williams. "Sometimes the director is just feeding the audience's demand for gore."

But even movies devoid of social messages can reveal social anxieties. Williams says that during the Reagan years, with the conservative backlash in full swing, American horror films took a pronounced turn to sadism and misogyny. The grisly but hugely popular slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s are reactionary to the core, he argues. "They show sexually active teenagers being victimized, falling under the knife of Freddy or Michael Myers or Jason. These films are punitive, a reaction against sexual liberation and alternative lifestyles."

Rather than getting "cathartic" endings in these films, movie audiences got endless sequels instead, Williams wrote in Hearths of Darkness. "The family is revealed as dark and destructive, but...there is little, if anything, its victims can do about it."

Other cultures deal with other demons in their horror films, as Williams's latest book, Horror International (Wayne State University Press, 2005), illustrates. Co-edited with Steven Jay Schneider of New York University, this anthology includes essays on the horror films of Germany, Italy, Mexico, Scandinavia, Romania, Thailand, Canada, Russia, Ireland, Australia, and other countries. Some of these, like Italy, have a long tradition of producing horror films; others, like Thailand, have developed the genre only in the past couple of decades.

Naturally, other countries' horror films have been influenced by, and have influenced, U.S. productions. (One of the more acclaimed American horror films of recent years, The Ring, is a remake of the Japanese ghost thriller Ringu.) Despite this cross-cultural exchange, however, horror films preserve "an indirect relationship to the culture of each society" that produces them, Williams says. Perhaps each culture gets the kind of horror films it deserves.

For example, one contributor to Horror International finds that much Scandinavian horror grows out of a conflict between ancient pagan values and Christian ones. Romanian horror films, now free from Soviet censorship, have been coming to terms with the country's past and its Dracula legend (derived from a real figure, Vlad the Impaler, who is a national hero). And Thai horror, which often features murderous but pitiable female ghosts, reflects concerns about the way sexual mores have changed in that country over the past few decades.

Williams, an expert on the cinema of Hong Kong, contributed an essay about that country's so-called "Category 3" horror films: those rated for graphic sex and violence (comparable to the X rating in the United States). In these gory productions, which generally feature serial killers and often throw in cannibalism to boot, brutality seems a natural outgrowth of the crowded conditions borne by the poor in Hong Kong.

These and other Hong Kong films, incidentally, are popular not just in Asia, but also in the United States, thanks partly to Asian Cult Cinema, a magazine that introduced Americans to them. With the Internet and DVDs, Americans now have ready access to films made around the world, and scholars of horror films are devoting more attention to those produced outside the United States.

In fact, Tony Williams doesn't see many American horror movies these days. "There have been very few interesting horror films over the past 15 years," he says. "The genre seems to be worn out. With the exception of George Romero, I think it has dissipated into gratuitous violence."

What about The Blair Witch Project, the horror film that has garnered more attention than any other in the past few years? Although Williams credits it for "taking horror seriously," he feels that it was "rather inept—a one-trick pony that didn't deserve the attention it got."

In contrast stands Williams's all-time favorite horror film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1973), a low-budget classic whose "raw" cinematic style—dark, grainy, realistic—significantly influenced the movie industry. "I like its relevant social commentary on class, which few American films treat seriously," Williams says. Chain Saw depicts brutality arising out of rural and social decline, with the poor attacking the affluent.

Horror may be a rather static genre in the United States right now, but Williams will always keep an eye out for the next Psycho or Texas Chain Saw Massacre—the next horror film that gives us something "significant or new," that tells us something interesting about who we are.

"That's what I really enjoy about them," he says.

Sidebar: A Career in the Movies

Sidebar: Culture as Crucible