Two singular visions of horror
Criticised
for decades of increasing mindlessness, paper-thin characters,
cheap-loud-noise-scares, lazy writing, and gratuitous use of violence, horror
movies had to get smart. Specifically,
they had to get meta. Again. Cue last year's The Cabin in the Woods: a gloriously extravagant send-up to the
creatures that haunt our dreams - most of which were granted an exhilarating
frame or two in the bombastic finale.
That the closing spectacle is so effective is, I argue, due to its
embodying the apotheosis of the realisation of horror: by showing, literally, everything (demons, giant reptiles,
pale-faced young girls and myriad other horror clichés), Cabin neutralises the aspect of fear and elides the comedic – even
farcical – despite its inclusion of frequent, very bloody scenes. Simply put: horror dissipates when dragged,
un-obscured, into the field of vision.
The movie ends with the
'destruction' of the world by the Dark God: a cataclysm suggesting the
(artistic) death of the genre and the concomitant punishment of an audience
reduced to a baying, bloodthirsty horde that would put the Aztecs to shame
(fittingly, Cabin's deity bursts
forth from the depths of an ancient temple).
Given horror's symbolic 'death', then, we must ask ourselves, again,
that most primal of questions: what is it that makes us afraid? And how can the visual medium of cinema work
to relay these anxieties? It is time to
restore the horror genre to its full potency, to reorient it in the territory
of the frightening; for that, we turn to the past. Audiences, as Cabin satirises, have been reduced to spectators of the suffering
body - and we must ask why, and for
what purpose horror cinema mediates and produces such intoxicating
effects. Put simply, there is something
troubling at work in the psyche, and reflected in the psychic affect of cinema.
