Found-footage horror films express a morbid fascination with the past, often depicting geographical ventures into sites of historical discord. The earliest instances of the subgenre, including the notorious video nasty Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) and the independent phenomenon The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), consist of ill-fated documentaries in search of mythic beasts or local legends, in which the characters probe forbidding aspects of their national history and national identity. These, and many other found-footage films, visualise the excavation of uncharted, abandoned and concealed spaces, as well as sites of repression and past trauma, through the lens of modern recording technologies.

Just as the focuses of these films signify disputed histories, the definition of found-footage is itself still disputed by film theorists and critics. Its brief appearance at the end of the 1990s, and exploding popularity at the beginning of the 2010s, has been discussed as a subgenre, a technique, an aesthetic, a hybridisation, and a marketing gimmick.[1] It’s most popular moniker—“found-footage”—is lifted from the opening caption of The Blair Witch Project, and typically involves the discovery of a mysterious piece of camera footage, which contains imagery of an allegedly real disaster, along with the final recorded days of someone’s life. The Found Footage Critic website has indexed over five-hundred titles in its database, and not all of them necessarily abide by the conventions established by Blair Witch – some employ a more formal documentary approach, intercutting raw footage with faux interviews, while others introduce a found-footage device within the context of an otherwise conventionally shot narrative film (for example, District 9, Neill Blomkamp, 2009).[2] While the original found-footage films belonged to horror cinema, other film genres, such as cop dramas, science-fiction, superhero, and teen comedies have also appropriated the style.[3]

While varying in content, tone and scope, the connecting premise of found-footage films is that they are shot diegetically, with hand-held and surveillance cameras which exist within the constructed world of the film. These cameras are claimed to have captured some kind of traumatic event that the viewer is now being given access to. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas observes that the raw, unmediated quality of the filming imbues the content with a greater sense of immediacy and immersion[4]; that is, we as an audience are situated within the same space and viewpoint as the characters, rather than watching them omnisciently. Because the films’ aesthetic continually insist that we share the same world as the monsters depicted, the way the horror is framed and received is dramatically reconfigured. This casting of the diegetic film camera as an instrument of spatial and temporal interrogation, and as a capsule of the past, has significant implications for theorising representations and explorations of trauma in contemporary horror film.

Trauma studies in cinema are less prolific than the study of trauma in literature (as typified by the work of Cathy Caruth[5]); however, the past few years have seen a handful of publications, suggesting a burgeoning field of research. For example, in The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema (2014), Julia Kohne, Michael Elm and Kobi Kabalek write that film is capable of visualising trauma because it can effectively depict “irregularities and anachronisms,” and “transport images [that have been] repressed or denied by the social body.”[6] Traumatic memory can be triggered by sensory stimuli, such as smells, taste, touch, and image, all of which can which can be translated into film  – dialogue, performances, camera angles and range, lighting, juxtaposition of figure and landscape, and use of space.[7] The horror genre is a particularly valuable tool in this regard, because horror films succeed by frightening people, and collective fears are inextricably linked with social transitions and political influences. Kohn et al calls film a “prosthetic memory,” serving as an “apt medium to vicariously experience global catastrophic events”.[8] Citing Linnie Blake’s The Wounds of Nations (2008) they argue that horror films are unique in their ability to “‘re-open national wounds that have been suppressed, overlooked or only superficially addressed”.[9] In his book Shocking Representation (2005), Adam Lowenstein concurs with this assessment, arguing that horror film is considered disreputable because it digs up social trauma, where other middle-brow and nationalistic narratives attempt to “[smooth] over the cracks.”[10] He notes that horror is rarely labelled middle-brow, because, whether it is regarded as trashy or transcendent, it always assaults the status quo.[11] These writers do not examine found-footage horror films specifically, but their works were published around the time of the found-footage resurgence (2007 onwards), which suggests, I would argue, a growing cultural awareness among horror filmmakers and theorists concerning historical trauma and its insidious hold on the present

While it can be argued that found-footage is a framing device which is available to be utilised in any film genre, this article will be looking at its original incarnation as a subgenre of horror cinema – specifically, films which resemble the doomed documentary premise of The Blair Witch Project and are concerned with investigating repressed or unreconciled features of a nation’s past. This strand of the subgenre stands in contrast with what might be called post-9/11 found-footage horror, exemplified by Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) and the REC films (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007), which are marked by large panicked crowds and breached urban spaces, and are thematically located in the present. Notably, both strands are concerned with a traumatic event, but the former concentrates on historical trauma while the latter concentrates on the ways in which contemporary disasters are experienced and communicated. Taking inspiration from the research of Kohne et al, Blake and Lowenstein, I will be looking at found-footage horror films from three different countries—Australia, Japan, and the United States—and examining the ways these films utilise the subgenre as a way of exploring notions of national identity and national wounds. The films use the diegetic camera as a way of inserting the viewer into the shock and disorientation of the past, allowing this embedded subjectivity and probing gaze to tease out themes of colonial subjugation, rural isolation, and collective madness. The camera frame serves not merely as a window into the past, but as an open wound, festering over time and infecting the characters exposed to it.

A Mutant Gaze – The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011)

The titular tunnel of this 2011 found-footage film constitutes both a subterranean history of modern-day Sydney, and a passage to repressed feelings of guilt surrounding the dispossession of people throughout Australian history. The film follows Nat, a current affairs reporter covering a story about the abandoned railway network beneath the city. These tunnels are so vast that they practically constitute a second hidden city, one now used by Sydney’s homeless population for shelter – a forgotten place for a forgotten people. Nat and her camera crew are investigating the state government’s plan to convert the tunnels into aqueducts as a supplementary source for the city’s water supply; public concerns are raised over the eviction of homeless inhabitants of the tunnels, followed by alarm as a spate of homeless people go missing, and finally bafflement as the government scraps the project altogether. After being refused an explanation by government ministers, the crew decides to sneak into the tunnels themselves to see what is really going on.

[Figure 1 – Nat and her crew sneaking into the tunnel via a maintenance gate, image courtesy of Deadhouse Films Pty. Ltd., 2011]

The film emphasises Sydney’s past by opening with black-and-white stills of the underground railways being built in the late 1800s; we see the soot-stained workers, including young boys, toiling in an immense quarry. These photographs are contrasted with the movements and rhythms of modern-day Sydney, including flashing traffic lights, rolling car tyres, a lattice of anonymous silhouettes, and puddles of water ebbing down a drain. The segmented framing of these shots (usually low-angle close-ups) evokes the gaze of a perplexed outsider, of someone looking up from the tunnels from a bygone era, from a past which has been washed away like so much rainwater. The sequence of the crew making their way beneath the city becomes a visual journey back in time. They pass through unused air raid shelters, complete with a massive iron warning bell; this architecture traces back to the city’s World War II heritage, and is a reminder of the inherent vulnerability of the seeming invincible metropolis above. They come across the living quarters of homeless people, which contradict the state’s view that the tunnels are uninhabited – though the squatters themselves are nowhere to be found. As they go deeper, all natural light vanishes, and they are forced to rely on their torches and camera lights to navigate the vast, silent labyrinth. The dwindling battery power of these lights provides a natural source of tension throughout the film, with the darkness of the tunnels constantly threatening to overtake them. Finally, they arrive at the water supply in question; named after the railway station above it, the St James Lake exposes the crew to the real, natural foundation of the city – the millennia-old ecosystem that Sydney is modestly, and perhaps only temporarily, occupying. To the viewer, such revelations of the fragility of urban structures and industrial progress are confronting, and perhaps do need to be separated from the public consciousness.

In contrast with other horror films, in which the monster returns to society of its own volition (to assault us with our own repressed thoughts and desires[12]), the found-footage films discussed in this article depict the act of seeking out the repressed in its own lair. In The Tunnel, the monster takes the form of a pale, bloodthirsty mutant who stalks the tunnels and devours intruders. It is revealed to be the cause behind the disappearances of homeless people and the government’s decision to abandon the aqueducts solution and deny public access to the project. Upon their ringing of the air raid bell (presumably, the first time in over half a century), the mutant emerges from the shadows (summoned as it were) and snatch’s one of the crew members. The creature’s movements are hidden by the darkness, and discernible only afterwards when Nat and the others review the recordings of a dropped video camera. Indeed, their attacker is never wholly witnessed by the characters or captured on film; just as the city above only exists as eerie segments to the mutant, the mutant is perceived by the crew as a collection of growls, snatched claws, glowing white eyes, and whispers through the walls. It refuses to be framed by the camera and flees from the crew whenever they shine their light on it. When it manages to capture Nat, it attacks her camera viciously, cracking the frame, submerging it in water, filling the speakers with a nauseating drone, and fracturing the picture to an indecipherable blur. Upon finally reaching the mutant’s lair, the characters comprehend the depths of its disdain for being looked upon when they discover a collection of severed eyeballs from past victims. The mutant is not just an inhabitant of the city who has been forgotten and suppressed, it actively works to deny its existence. In horror film convention, mutation is often the result of an experiment gone wrong, pandemic disease, or the mismanagement of radiation, which would, for example, shed further light on why the government ministers had an interest in keeping the creature a secret. However, as a metaphor, the mutant’s presence in The Tunnel suggests something different: it is not an agent foreign and therefore inimical to humanity, but rather a deformation of the known, of the human. The creature’s biological distortions and ulcerated flesh serve as a twisted reflection of the Australian citizen’s national identity as they wrestle with history.

[Figure 2 – The crew regrouping after the mutant attacks, image courtesy of Deadhouse Films Pty. Ltd., 2011]

A dominant theme throughout The Tunnel, along with other found-footage films like Cloverfield and Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2010), is its critical attitude to the state’s attempts to mislead the public in order to enforce its own agenda. The government minsters’ refusals to answer Nat’s questions regarding the tunnel demonstrate a paternalistic attitude towards the public, and a want to both control national narratives and suppress diverging testimonies. Heller-Nicholas argues that The Tunnel can be read as an allegory for the “history wars” carried out within Australian politics from the early 1990s onwards.[13] In particular, she draws a comparison between the disappearances and forced relocations of homeless people in the film, and the historical mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Britain’s claim of terra nullus was one of the founding rationalisations of Australian colonisation, the insistence upon the “bizarre conceit” of an empty land waiting to be populated and civilised.[14] In The Tunnel, the government similarly denies that the tunnels are inhabited, and deprives the already marginalised of their shelter and safety. The film is set less than 3 kilometres from Redfern Park, the site of Prime Minister Paul Keating’s famous 1992 address in which he publically acknowledged the difficulties facing Indigenous Australians because of European settlement; he confessed that: “We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.”[15] Drawing upon the work of Felicity Collins and Therese Davis[16], Heller-Nicholas’ analysis of The Tunnel points out that the invalidation of terra nullus in the early 1990s, with the Mabo decision, was a defining moment for Australia, a “watershed political event that triggered a broader crisis in the national psyche.”[17] It disrupted white Australia’s comprehension of its own past, reconceptualising Australia as a nation invaded and stolen rather than discovered.[18] Significantly, the locale directly above the St James Lake is Hyde Park, an historically important part of Sydney which served as the favoured playground of white affluent Australians and British authority figures;[19] it epitomizes the sanitised vision of colonial history, whereas The Tunnel contends that the dark web of haunted stone beneath—carved by convicts, immigrants and the working poor—is the reality. The mutant, with its penchant for gouging out prying eyes, becomes symbolic of this repressed, neglected past and the unreconciled trauma of colonisation. The film underscores this reading by continually attesting the limitations of the camera—the locations are often too poorly lit for it to detect images, it is continually dropped and damaged—which restricts the vision of the characters and viewers.

The dialectic invoked by found-footage horror—of one group trying to expose the past while another tries to keep it buried in favour of a more placating narrative—has potent implications for political discourse.  The subversive, unauthorised gaze of the found-footage camera, as it films these secret cover-ups and concealed spaces, styles the subgenre as an accessible mechanism for presenting opposing historical viewpoints. In her book, Heller-Nicholas cites Adam Lowenstein’s analogy about horror films being “the return of history through the gut.”[20] This critique is evident in The Tunnel, not just in the viciously punctured bodies of the characters confronted by a vengeful mutant, but also in the geographical guts of subterranean Sydney. The dark, dank walls which the characters are forced to navigate are cracked with age, covered in dust and cobwebs, broken by the twisting iron spokes fastening the stone, and increasingly smeared with blood and viscera. The diegetic camera, though limited, is able to peel back the glossy cosmopolitan flesh of Sydney to expose the historical entrails within.

Voices in Your Head – Occult (Kôji Shiraishi, 2009)

As eerie as it is bleakly comic, the found-footage film Occult connects the emergence of doomsday cults in Japan with the delayed anxieties of apocalypse moulded by World War II. The film’s central character Shohei Eno is an unemployed man caught in a psychic struggle between blind obedience to a higher power (a mythic god)—characteristic of the ultra-nationalist conformity of pre-war Japan—and the growing isolation and spiritual emptiness of post-war liberalism. Occult takes the form of an ongoing documentary about a mass murder which occurred at a Japanese national park; the incident was caught on camera by a several nearby tourists and shows a man named Ken Matsuki stabbing two women to death, stabbing a frightened Eno several times, and then hurling himself off a nearby cliff. The documentary filmmakers interview the witnesses of the attack, the families of the murdered women, Matsuki’s father, and the survivor Eno. From photographs provided by the father, they discover that the stab wounds inflicted upon Eno resemble a petroglyph-like birthmark on Matsuki’s chest, which Matsuki believed was a mark from a divine being. Eno tells the filmmakers that since the attack he has been experiencing strange supernatural occurrences, such as moving objects, visions of swirling patterns and shapes in the sky, and prophetic messages; he reveals that before Ken stabbed him, he uttered the words “it is your turn,” which Eno gradually interprets as a command from a god to fulfil a similarly violent “ceremony.” Fascinated by Eno’s experiences, and observing that he is financially troubled, the filmmakers loan him one of their cameras and agree to pay him if he can capture some of this supernatural phenomena.

Eno’s paranoia about unidentified flying objects, and his compulsion to frantically survey the sky with his camera, is suggestive of latent anxieties about the aerial attacks carried out by America on Japan towards the end of World War II. The objects’ sudden, flashing appearance and tentacle shapes throughout the film resemble witness testimonies of the atomic bombings; for example, in a recent newspaper interview, Reiko Toida, who was nine years old when Nagasaki was bombed, recalls seeing “a blinding flash of light, a huge bang, and then what looked like a jellyfish appear[ing] in the sky” above the city.[21] The sheer magnitude of devastation and disintegration the war engendered has remained at the forefront of Japanese consciousness, and even during American occupation and reconstruction, many Japanese citizens continued to feel crippling panic whenever a plane would fly overhead.[22] Occult’s camerawork subtly evokes this unease, particularly when Eno is operating it, as he continually uses the lens to hunt for uncanny entities above or within the city – which, once they finally do appear, shock him and convert his footage into a panicked blur. In the decades succeeding  the war, theorists observed recurring images of apocalypse throughout Japanese cinema – from the effects of radiation poisoning depicted in Black Rain (a 1965 novel by Masuji Ibuse, adapted into a 1989 film by Shohei Imamura), to the spectre of a city-levelling monsters being conjured by nuclear testing in the Godzilla series (Ishirō Honda, 1954–).[23] Anime films, such as Barefoot Gen (Mori Masaki, 1983), Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988), and Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) present dystopic visions of Japan through the eyes of orphaned children, who attempt to navigate a cityscape rife with crime, disease and starvation. The Japan depicted in Occult is a decisive contrast – a modern, stable, peaceful country, encapsulated by the delight of the tourists at the beginning of the film, who are videotaping each other against the backdrop of a lush forest. However, this reality is intermittently punctured, first by the violent acts and parting words of the murderer Matsuki, and then by the nightmarish visions plaguing Eno, which not only re-introduce the prospect of an imminent doom, but reconfigure it as a doom which must be fulfilled by Japanese people themselves.

[Figure 3 – Eno preparing to commit a terrorist attack, image courtesy of Creative Axa Co. Ltd., 2009]

Occult’s depiction of doomsday cults has a basis in modern Japanese history. During the 1973 oil crisis, Japan (which imported 71% of its oil from the Middle East) experienced widespread panic, with many of its citizens stockpiling food and supplies. It was during this period that “new religions” such as the ESP and Nostradamus prophecy groups began to emerge. Kaoru Nishimura writes that such anxieties were an indirect transmission from the war, an ingrained fear that “the days of devastation and hunger would return.”[24] The 1980s saw the founding of the notorious Aum Shinrikyo cult, whose members would go onto commit acts of domestic terrorism, such as the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, which killed 12 people and severely injured 50 more; this made it the deadliest incident to occur in Japan since the end of World War II, particularly disturbing in that it was performed by middle-class citizens rather than a foreign enemy. Like Aum Shinyikyo’s fusing of Buddhist and Christian lore with predictions of nuclear war, the mass murders prophesised in Occult are shaped around the Shinto origin myth of Hiruko – the name given to the deformed first offspring of the ancient Japanese deities. The documentary filmmakers venture back into the forest where the first murders occurred, and upon climbing the rock where Matsuki committed suicide, find a millennia-old shrine to Hiruko, the carving of which match Matsuki’s birthmark and the pattern he stabbed into Eno’s back. This further convinces Eno that he is being directed to carry out a mass murder in the name of the gods, and thus deliver the souls of his victims to a more enlightened plane. He begins plotting a suicide bombing to be executed at a crowded Tokyo train station, which echoes the real-life sarin attacks committed by Aum Shinyikyo. His intentions are revealed covertly through his remarks to the camera, which acts as a video journal of his spiral into madness. Director Kôji Shiraishi derives much of the horror of the film from the series of rationalisations that a sane, everyday man can undergo before he commits an unspeakable act against innocent people. The diegetic camera creates a level of intimacy between the viewer and Eno, allowing us to see the world through his eyes; he discloses his private thoughts to it, confesses his vulnerabilities and frustrations, and offers us a disturbingly empathetic portrait of premediated murder.

Thought not referenced in the film, Occult reflects the horrors of Japan’s involvement in World War II, and the psychic damage war can imprint upon individuals, communities, and across generations. Catholic priest Takeshi Kawazoe, who was 13 years old when the bombings on Japan began, recalls the radical militarism of the Imperial Japanese even as defeat became inescapable: “We were training to fight with sharpened bamboo sticks and we would have been massacred if the war had continued… People were brainwashed, just like the followers of Aum Shinrikyo today.”[25] Kawazoe is alluding to the ultra-nationalist and fascist ideologies that dominated Japan before and during the war; at this time, Japanese people were educated to believe that their sole duty was to serve the divine emperor without question, to sacrifice their lives for the nation willingly, and to attack the enemies of Japan mercilessly. The state strengthened this ideology by invoking Bushido, the ancient code of the samurai warrior, but distorted its philosophy to emphasise only martial spirit, absolute loyalty, and the dissolution of personal identity in favour of a collective will.[26] This submission was seen by citizens as a way of overcoming inner and outer threats to Japan; however, it also contributed to the facilitation of atrocious war crimes committed by imperial soldiers throughout Indochina and South-East Asia, including the Rape of Nanking and the systemic torture and murder of war prisoners. Nishimura writes that after the war, sections of the Japanese people felt great shame at having this mass surrender of personal identity exposed, and were overcome by feelings hatred towards the royal family for their championing of the war. This in turn lead to a generational shift—nurtured by the liberal democracy that America helped institute during reconstruction—away from “associating the value of life with contributing to the nation”, and towards establishing a personal identity and “enriching ones private’s life.”[27]

Occult explores this fragmenting of Japanese identity. Eno is a product of post-war Japan, an individual trying to earn a decent enough wage in Tokyo to live the life he desires; however, as an unemployed man with no higher education or specialised training, and barely enough money to eat, he expresses the isolation and aimlessness of one who has been rejected by Japan’s modern liberal economy. Nishimura observes that because of the historical conformity of Japanese culture, the anxieties of an individual, as exemplified by Eno’s feelings of isolation, can be inferred by that person as being the anxieties of the whole nation.[28] The allure of Occult’s Hiruko cult—that is, mysterious signs telling people exactly what they should be doing and how important their sacrifices will be for the greater good—represents the allure of pre-war fascism. Thus, the film can be seen to communicate the horrifying prospect of the voice of fascism returning to Japan, and the secondary horror of people wanting to listen to it. Eno believes that by bombing a crowded railway station, he will not be killing people, but delivering them to a better world – a romanticised vision of the past, ordained by the gods.

[Figure 4 – The documentarians hiking to the Hiruko shrine, image courtesy of Creative Axa Co. Ltd., 2009]

Suicide also plays a significant ideological role in the horror of Occult; the film opens with one man committing mass murder and then jumping off a cliff to his death, and then ends with another man blowing himself up in a crowded street. This circular structure evokes Japan’s complicated relationship with suicide. At around 30,000 instances a year, the country has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Sinead Roarty writes that this stems from the historical function of suicide in the samurai code, that is, the expectation that the defeated warrior must die by his own hand, rather his enemy’s, in order to preserve his honour. This tradition was carried over into World War II, with Japanese kamikaze pilots being ordered to intentionally crash their planes into enemy vessels, and thousands of soldiers on Okinawa killing themselves after the island had been conquered or feigning surrender only to blow themselves up.[29] Thus, Eno’s planned suicide bombing can be situated within historical practices. Suicide was also socially tolerated in instances where a person was unable to pay their debts and wanted to spare their families from financial burden, or when elderly members of the community let themselves die to make room for the younger generation; it was even romanticised in folktales about lovers who were forbidden to be together in life, and thus killed themselves so that they might be reunited in death.[30]

The film’s use of forest imagery, particularly the location of the Hiruko shrine, is suggestive of the Aokigahara forest – the most popular suicide location in Japan. Roarty writes that Aokigahara’s cultural association with suicide goes back centuries, to the point where many Japanese people believe it is haunted.[31] The forest is so immense and isolated that many suicidal people simply wander into it and become lost, trusting in the elements to wear them down. Others hang themselves from trees, where they are not found for months or even years.[32] Notably, Aokigahara is only a short distance from Kamikuishiki village, the original headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo, both of which are located at the base of Mount Fuji. The forest, a public space, becomes the stage for the most private act of all – death. Occult echoes this dichotomy with the carvings of the Hiruko shrine, an ancient woodland marking which is violently reconstituted onto the private flesh of the characters. This cultural connection between land, identity and self-destruction embeds suicide within the Japanese cultural memory. Suicide is a crippling social issue in contemporary Japan—especially among its young people—which the current government are desperately trying to address and prevent.[33] Occult attempts to de-romanticise the practice by showing its poisonous and destructive effects on the community.

Occult addresses Japanese historical trauma in several effective and disturbing ways, creating visual links between the events of World War II, the emergence of doomsday cults, and ingrained attitudes towards suicide. The film evokes Japan’s difficult cultural construction of the war, in which it must navigate its paradoxical role as both victim of unspeakable suffering and perpetrator of unspeakable suffering, while also addressing its underlying fear of destruction from without and from within.

Return to the Woods – Willow Creek (Bobcat Goldwaith, 2013)

In his 2013 found-footage horror debut, Bobcat Goldwaith reframes the legend of Bigfoot as an allegory for the apprehensions of contemporary Americans when confronted with their nation’s vast and mythic wilderness. Willow Creek, which is shot entirely on a single HD digital video camera, follows a couple named Jim and Kelly as they travel to the Six Rivers National Forest to make an amateur documentary about the many alleged Bigfoot sightings which have occurred there, and also to learn about the culture which has flourished around the legend. The film is notable for being a found-footage entry in which the original artefact behind the legend also claims to be a kind of found-footage; that is, the Patterson-Gimlin short film, which was shot in 1967 on a shaky 16mm camera, and captures an immense furry humanoid creature striding on two feet towards the forest edge. While most scientists have dismissed the original short film as a hoax, special effects artists have pointed out that the length and shape of the creature’s limbs, and the realism of its movements and musculature, would be very difficult to fake, even today.[34] It was the first alleged visual evidence of such a creature, and forms part of centuries old American myth regarding a species of unidentified apelike men living in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The main characters of Willow Creek, Jim and Kelly, plan to retrace the journey of Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, in the hopes of finding new evidence, such as hair, footprints, or even making a new sighting.

The naïveté and occasional arrogance displayed by the couple during their trip recalls the attitudes of similar cinematic city-dwellers venturing into the countryside, as seen in films like Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) and Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981). Because the majority of Americans now live in cities, film has increasingly situated modern America life in urban and suburban contexts; rural spaces are thus reconfigured as foreign sites, or rather, as sites which represent a past vision of America, alternatively romantic and forbidding in their aura.[35] Horror films (like the three cited above) have reinforced the forbidding element of this shift, casting the countryside as regressive, isolated places hostile towards outsiders. In Willow Creek, Goldwaith depicts a gradual transition from a vague suburban notion of Bigfoot (something akin to a Halloween cartoon character), towards something more arcane and frightening at the core of the legend. Jim and Kelly delight at the kitsch artwork of the township, such as the smiling wooden statue welcoming tourists, to the jaunty songs recited by eccentric locals. They conduct light-hearted interviews, and learn about the Bigfoot-themed tourism that sustains the local economy. They notice a large painted mural of Bigfoot helping to clear the forest and raise the town’s buildings, and joke about how the creature is probably just a disgruntled labourer. Yet, underlying the mural is an ambiguous message about the civilising of the West: the exploitation of America’s natural and human resources, the ideology of manifest destiny, the harnessing of primeval energies. Read as an allegorical figure, one could construe Goldwaith’s Bigfoot as a vengeful agent of pre-colonial America, or as representative of the persecuted, forgotten peoples (such as rural, indigenous, slave, and immigrant labour) who helped build America, but were excluded from its triumphs and plenitude.

[Figure 5 – Alleged evidence of a Bigfoot, taken from the Patterson-Gimlin film, 1967]

The Bigfoot iconography of the town suggests a monstrosity which has been safely contained within an accepted narrative; however, the growing sense of menace attached to the nearby forest suggests an enduring, perhaps even hostile atmosphere. For example, during one of Jim and Kelly’s interviews, a local man cautions them against going into the forest, warning them of some of the strange folk who live there, such as pot-growers and survivalists, who are not fond of tourists. The same man also recounts an instance in which he was walking his dog through the forest, when suddenly the animal grew frightened and bolted, only to be found hours later torn in two. It is a reminder of the primeval dangers of the wild. Later, the couple notice a flyer for a missing person on the wall of the diner, and mistake it as part of the fantasy, which prompts Kelly to give a mock pose for her own missing person flyer. The fatalistic framework of the subgenre (as evidenced in the previous two films examined) foreshadows such light-hearted moments as future obituaries. Finally, while making fun of the wooden Bigfoot statue, a passer-by scolds them, telling them, “It’s not a joke, you know. You shouldn’t go out there.” These moments pierce the couple’s superficial perception of American rurality – that it is something which serves merely as a receptacle for tourists to extract entertainment and experiences, something which can be safely framed and controlled through the technological representation of the camera.

The film draws an implicit connection between Bigfoot and the figure of the American backwoodsman, as characterised by Linnie Blake in The Wounds of Nations. Where American settlers and frontier communities were historically idealised as honest, hard-working, god-fearing folk, the backwoodsmen emerged in critiques dating back to the eighteenth century as being representative of the darker side of pastoral living.[36] For writers like John Hector St. John, this figure was the antithesis of a rural American utopia – instead of faithfully tending and taming the land in the name of Christendom, the backwoodsman embraced the “dark irrationality” of the wilderness by living an existence of drunkenness and idleness.[37] Upon arriving at the forest in the film, James and Kelly are confronted with a large hairy man who demands that they turn their vehicle around and leave, for their own good. When Jim dismisses the man’s concerns, he becomes aggressive, poking Jim in the chest and yelling at Kelly to cease her filming. Intimidated, they reverse their vehicle, hoping to find another way into the forest, whereupon the man begins to throw rocks after them. He appears to be one of the strange folk whom the interviewee had warned them about. The anger the man directs towards their camera evokes the distain for technological representation that Bigfoot seems to display in the 1967 short film – the creature offers Patterson and Gimlin only a disdainful glance as he strides back towards the forest. It marks a shift from implicit to explicit hostility at the couple’s attempt to enter the forest; it also recasts their role: they are now trespassers into a space which they neither understand, nor respect, and which has prohibited them.

Along with casting the country as increasingly foreign to American audiences, film and television have perpetuated the stereotype of the backwoodsmen (also using variations such as “hillbillies” or “rednecks”), depicting them as everything from good-natured eccentrics to genetically deficient predators. This culturally implied friction between civilisation and savagery aligns with the perpetuation of the Bigfoot myth – a half-man, half-animal, embedded within the American wilderness, whose possible existence is both beguiling and repulsive to American society. Ironically, the backwoodsman asserts the freedoms of the American citizen, in that he demonstrates the freedom to reject the state—its values, its rhetoric, its authority—and to live independently and self-reliantly.[38] Whether he was forced out of his community or departed voluntarily, the backwoodsman claimed the American wilderness as a home beyond the reach of government and church. Thus, as a stereotype—despite embracing the liberty that urban Americans have conceded the limits of—he became associated with lawlessness, deviance and violence; his otherness was communicated through recurring image of unkempt hair, wild eyes, and rotten teeth, as though to express a personhood which was fundamentally diseased.[39] Still darker interpretations have equated the backwoodsman with rapacious sexuality, most famously in the film Deliverance, in which a group of men from Atlanta take a weekend trip to the Georgia wilds, only to have one of the men set upon and brutally raped by a pair of snarling, toothless locals. Willow Creek links its monster with similar sexual violence, by implying that the woman from the missing person flyer has been kidnapped by Bigfoot as a “forest bride,” and thus placing Kelly as another potential victim. Representations of rural communities became synonymous with cultural backwardness – as the broken-down collections of citizens who had been left behind or forgotten by a modernising, progressive and globalising nation. [40] The stereotype of the backwoods symbolises not just the darker implications of freedom, but a contestation of America’s national narrative and unity.

Willow Creek exhibits the dread of the modern American at encountering the dark irrationality of the wilderness in its climactic sequence – a twenty-minute unbroken shot inside the couple’s tent during their first night in the woods. The scene begins tenderly, with Jim taking the occasion to propose to Kelly, and stationing his camera to capture the moment. Unfortunately, the romance of their embrace is interrupted by ominous sounds emanating from outside the tent. At first these are faint—the crunching of leaves and long animalistic vocalisations—but as the sounds become louder, the couple grows tense. Framed by the Bigfoot myth, these disparate sounds of the wild are assembled into a single menacing presence. By aligning our subjectivity with the camera, we are essentially positioned as a third character, trapped in the same tent as Jim and Kelly, paralysed by the same fear and threatened by the same monstrosity. Goldwaith derives horror from the interplay between the cryptic soundscape beyond the tissue-thin canvas and the couple’s body language – their strained attention (which echoes our own), their worried expression as the sound escalates, their relaxation as it subsides, their whispered attempts to reason out the situation beyond their field of vision, and finally Kelly’s blind panic and screaming as monstrous growls emerge just outside the tent. The tent walls, which we have viewed as static for 20 unbroken minutes, are suddenly interrupted by rocks and poking limbs (harkening back to the hostile man’s warnings). This intrusion provokes Kelly to bury her head in Jim’s lap; this response, combined with her childlike shrieks and the womblike shape of the tent, suggests a primal nightmare, composed of sense rather than language.

The lack of cuts makes this sequence unbearably tense, and demonstrates the feelings of claustrophobia and vulnerability that found-footage can generate. Indeed, it bears a strong resemblance to the nightly camping scenes in The Blair Witch Project; like that film, the monster in Willow Creek is never actually documented by the camera. The trauma of the encounter is located in absence, in the subjective camera’s inability to frame or comprehend what is tormenting it, in the sensorial rush of terror that assaults that subjectivity from a wholly inconceivable source. The concealed menace of this particular encounter conjures the broader possible traumas that underlie the formation of America, which Jim and Kelly are compelled to investigate, and punished for their efforts. Found-footage allows Bigfoot to break out of the mummified past of songs and statues and murals, and to claw its way into the present.

Undead History (Conclusion)

Historical trauma, by its nature, is largely inaccessible to the public consciousness. It exists as an unstable gap in cultural memory, a gap which haunts people with its incompleteness and the vague but indefinable feelings of dread tied to it. Found-footage horror films, like nightmares, depict a collision of the past (the footage of what has happened, but cannot be spoken) with the present (the secluded aftermath), reinserting the viewer into a traumatic moment through the assaultive images and panicked rhythms of the subgenre. Correspondingly, there is no future in found-footage horror, no forward gaze – there is only the fluctuating space between living a disaster that you cannot escape or survive, and watching that disaster re-enacted without the power to alter or intervene. The interplay between performer, viewer, mode, and aesthetic disorganises the world and scrambles our perceptions of time, much like trauma.

Testimony—the act of bearing witness to traumatic events—is crucial to confronting trauma itself. The subjects and viewers of found-footage horror are cast in the role of investigators (or archaeologists) sifting through the past in search of some buried sorrow. The films examined in this article—The Tunnel, Occult, and Willow Creek—engage with the historical sorrows of their respective countries. Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie write that horror does not flinch from or skirt the borders of trauma – it works through its feelings and sensations, often in expressly repulsive ways. It is therefore the ideal framework for exploring trauma because it is the most self-consciously disturbed and disturbing of all film forms.[41] According to Adam Lowenstein, horror cinema assaults the foundations of history, at once acknowledging the pain of trauma, while challenging the citizens and communities of the world on their inherent complicity in its perpetration.[42] As we view found-footage films, we are compelled to scan the screen for clues, to probe the visual evidence of the footage in search of some buried truth. The camera becomes the visualisation of that search for the repressed, while the collated nature of found-footage evokes the psychic fragmentation which trauma provokes.

Notes

[1] See: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014), 3–28; Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Reel Evil: A Critical Reassessment of Found Footage Horror,” Gothic Studies 17 (2015): 122–136; Neil McRobert, “Mimesis of Media: Found Footage Cinema and the Horror of the Real,” Gothic Studies 17 (2015): 137–150.

[2] Found Footage Critic, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.foundfootagecritic.com/

[3] Examples include: End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012), Europa Report (Sebastián Cordero, 2013), Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012), and Project X (Nima Nourizadeh, 2012).

[4] Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 8-9.

[5] See: Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

[6] Julia B. Kohne, Michael Elm and Kobi Kabalek, The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization, (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 9.

[7] Kohne, et al., The Horrors of Trauma, 10.

[8] Kohne, et al., The Horrors of Trauma, 12.

[9] Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 9.

[10] Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2005), 159.

[11] Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 150.

[12] Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 107-144.

[13] Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 182

[14] Paul Keating, “Redfern Speech” (speech delivered at Redfern Park,  New South Wales, December 1992), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKhmTLN3Ddo

[15] Keating, “Redfern Speech.”

[16] See: Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

[17] Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 183.

[18] Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 183.

[19] Heller-Nicholas, Found Footage Horror Films, 184.

[20] Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representations, 52.

[21] Philip Wen, “Survivors Determined to Tell Horrors of Nuclear Bombing that is part of Japanese Psyche,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/world/survivors-determined-to-tell-horrors-of-nuclear-bombing-that-is-part-of-japanese-psyche-20150805-gis8z0.html

[22] Sarah Stillman, “Hiroshima and the Inheritance of Trauma,” The New Yorker, August 12, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hiroshima-inheritance-trauma

[23] Ted Goossen, Japan’s Literature of the Apocalypse,” The Globe and Mail, March 25, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/japans-literature-of-the-apocalypse/article4266802/

[24] Kaoru Nishimura, “Unresolved Trauma and Japanese Identity after the Second World War,” (paper presented at the International Congress of Group Psychotherapy and Group Processes’ Exploring the Transgenerational Footprints of War symposium, Rome, Italy, August, 2009), 5.

[25] Ben Hills, “Forgotten City Faces the Truth: The bomb Fifty Years of Fallout,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 1995, 26.

[26] Nishimura, “Unresolved Trauma and Japanese Identity,” 2.

[27] Nishimura, “Unresolved Trauma and Japanese Identity,” 3.

[28] Nishimura, “Unresolved Trauma and Japanese Identity,” 9.

[29] Sinead Roarty, “Death Wishing and Cultural Memory: A Walk Through Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’” (paper presented at the 3rd Global Conference Making Sense of Suicide, Salzburg, November 2012), 2–3.

[30] Roarty, “Death Wishing,” 5.

[31] Roarty, “Death Wishing,” 7.

[32] Rob Gilhooly, “Inside Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’,” The Japan Times, June 26, 2011, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/06/26/general/inside-japans-suicide-forest/#.WNBtSqIlH4Y

[33] Leo Lewis, “90 Suicides a Day Spur Japan into Action,” The Times, November 12, 2013, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2852762.ece

[34] David J. Daegling, “Bigfoot’s Screen Test: Analysis of the Patterson-Gilmin Film of Bigfoot,” Sceptical Inquirer, 1999, http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/SI_99_daegling.htm

[35] Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 130.

[36] Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 128.

[37] John Hector St. John, Letters From an American Farmer (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 44.

[38] Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 131-132.

[39] Blake, The Wounds of Nations, 143-144.

[40] See: Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, Katherine Ledford, Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).

[41] Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie, “Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema,” in Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes and Linnie Blake (New York City: I.B.Tauris, 2015), 71–72.

[42] Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 14.

Notes on Contributor

Duncan Hubber is a PhD candidate at Federation University Australia. His thesis, entitled “Digital Wounds”, focuses on the relationship between found footage horror films and screen trauma theory, and draws upon the writings of Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Judith Herman. His other research interests include the cinematic representation of cities and urban spaces, and the collision of romanticism and postmodernism in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy literature.

Bibliography

Billings, Dwight B., Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford. Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

Blake, Linnie, and Mary Ainslie. “Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema.” In Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage. Edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes and Linnie Blake. 69-79. New York City: I.B.Tauris, 2015.

Blake, Linnie’s. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema After Mabo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Daegling, David J. “Bigfoot’s Screen Test: Analysis of the Patterson-Gilmin Film of Bigfoot.” Sceptical Inquirer, 1999, http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/SI_99_daegling.htm

Found Footage Critic, accessed Feb 2, 2017, http://foundfootagecritic.com/

Gilhooly, Rob. “Inside Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’.” The Japan Times, June 26, 2011, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2011/06/26/general/inside-japans-suicide-forest/#.WNBtSqIlH4Y

Goossen, Ted, “Japan’s Literature of the Apocalypse.” The Globe and Mail, March 25, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/japans-literature-of-the-apocalypse/article4266802/

Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014.

Hills, Ben. “Forgotten City Faces the Truth: The Bomb Fifty Years of Fallout.” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 1995.

Keating, Paul. “Redfern Speech.” Speech delivered at Redfern Park, New South Wales, December 1992, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKhmTLN3Ddo

Kohne, Julia B., Michael Elm and Kobi Kabalek. “Introduction.” In The Horrors of Trauma in Cinema: Violence Void Visualization, 1-29. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

Leo Lewis. “90 Suicides a Day Spur Japan into Action.” The Times, November 12, 2013, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2852762.ece

Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York City: Columbia University Press, 2005.

McRobert, Neil. “Mimesis of Media: Found Footage Cinema and the Horror of the Real.” Gothic Studies 17 (2015): 137-150.

Nishimura, Kaoru. “Unresolved Trauma and Japanese Identity after the Second World War.” Paper presented at the International Congress of Group Psychotherapy and Group Processes’ Exploring the Transgenerational Footprints of War symposium, Rome, Italy, August, 2009.

Reyes, Xavier Aldana. “Reel Evil: A Critical Reassessment of Found Footage Horror.” Gothic Studies 17 (2015): 122-136.

Roarty, Sinead. “Death Wishing and Cultural Memory: A Walk Through Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’.” Paper presented at the 3rd Global Conference Making Sense of Suicide, Salzburg, November 2012.

St. John, John Hector. Letters from an American Farmer, 1782. London: Penguin Books, 1982.

Stillman, Sarah. “Hiroshima and the Inheritance of Trauma.” The New Yorker, August 12, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hiroshima-inheritance-trauma

Wen, Philip. “Survivors Determined to Tell Horrors of Nuclear Bombing that is part of Japanese Psyche.” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/world/survivors-determined-to-tell-horrors-of-nuclear-bombing-that-is-part-of-japanese-psyche-20150805-gis8z0.html

Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Edited by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 107-144. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004.

Filmography

Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) 

Barefoot Gen (Mori Masaki, 1983)

Black Rain (Shohei Imamura, 1989)

The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)

Chronicle (Josh Trank, 2012)

Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972)

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012)

Europa Report (Sebastián Cordero, 2013)

Godzilla (Ishirō Honda, 1954)

Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988)

The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977)

Occult (Kôji Shiraishi, 2009)

Project X (Nima Nourizadeh, 2012)

[REC] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007)

Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981)

The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011)

Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2012)

Willow Creek (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2013)

In a previously published chapter The Scream in Visual Culture: The Scream as Fearful Response[1] I observed that images of screaming proliferate in 20th century visual and auditory culture, in painting and film, sound recording and music, and suggested that screaming is an impulsive, immediate and spontaneous response to physical and psychological cruelty and suffering as well as to traumatic or ecstatic human experience. However, screaming is not just an individual, automatic response to personal suffering, fright, joy etc. but when meted out abundantly in culture through images and other forms of representation, screamers and screaming become universal or collective responses to the multiple crises and traumas of the era, and a synonym for both the cruel individual and collective human experience of the 20^th century.

The Human Scream is at the hub of our understanding of the 20^th century. It resounds and echoes across the era, across the scope of historical and cultural experience – a universal response wholly apposite to the social, economic and political cruelties, architectures, changes and historical traumas of the era.[2]

In 20^th century culture there is an abundance of screams and screamers. Consider, for instance, the paintings of the Irish artist Francis Bacon, whose images of boxed-in, silent screamers, resonate iconographically in English director and sound artist/designer Peter Strickland’s film Berberian Sound Studio (2012) in which again we are shown images of screaming bodies enclosed within the sound booths of the studio (Figure 1) or the agonised scream which emits from ‘Mouth’ (a disembodied mouth hanging in a void of darkness) in the avant-garde Irish writer, novelist and dramatist Samuel Beckett’s monologue Not I (1973), or the fractured voices, screams and glossolalia[3] of surrealist, writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud’s final (censored and therefore silenced) recorded work for radio, To Have Done With The Judgement of God (1947); his final apocalyptic attempt to realise a ‘Theatre of  Cruelty’[4]. Both Beckett and Artaud will later help frame a discussion of the scream in Strickland’s work where they have an emphatic presence.

Of course the scream is not the sole possession of the avant-garde and the experimental. It is also part of the furniture of popular cinema, particularly horror cinema: an integral part of its apparatus and ornamentation – a narrative reaction to something horrifying or monstrous: the slashing blade of a serial killer, a giant monster rampaging across a sprawling urban metropolis; a sudden confrontation with the undead. It has a narrative function, telling the audience where and when to be afraid, an indicator as to the climax of a frightening sequence and an instance of catharsis and release.  It mediates our reaction to the terrifying scenario before us.  In considering the scream as part of the furniture of popular cinema, we may note here the ubiquity of both the “Wilhelm Scream” (which Professor Benjamin Wright notes has six variants) and the “Howie Scream”—two stock sound affects which have reverberated across movies since the early 1950s and the early 1980s respectively. In discussing the Wilhelm scream Wright observes:

Among the dense layers of sound effects, music and dialogue of the films is a stock sound affect that has transcended its status as a relic of old Hollywood to become a fixture of contemporary cinema…the Wilhelm scream.[5]

Furthermore, he observes the Wilhelm scream’s first use in the western Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, USA, 1951,) and its much later use in films such as Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, USA, 1983):

As a sonic signature, the Wilhelm shriek binds together decades of film sound history…Wilhelm is both a paean to the studio era and a testament to the art of sound editing.[6]

The Wilhelm and Howie screams are fixed responses, fixed points across a variety of genres and cinematic forms.  The same two screams have also, at the same time, been heard across a variety of contexts, their meaning and signification changing according to scenario. Sonically, the scream remains the same. However, as Wright suggests, “a scream by any other name is just a scream”[7], but no one scream is ever the same; they differ in tone, pitch, frequency, urgency, volume and duration, and are formed in relation to the experience they respond to. Screams are responses which resist, replace and displace reasoned and articulate expression, certainly this is the case in both the works of both Artaud and Beckett.

Peter Strickland is a contemporary director and sound artist/designer whose work re-interrogates this 20^th century cultural and cinematic phenomenon of the scream from a 21^st century perspective. In Strickland’s films the scream is post-modern: reimagined, recast, deconstructed and re-mediated via a set of diegetic and non-diegetic devices, which forcefully separate the scream from the screamer, who is left as an inert, catatonic presence. This article seeks not only to discuss the role and presence of the scream in Strickland’s cinema but also to recognise the influence of the Irish dramatist and writer Samuel Beckett and the dissident surrealist and founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud within Strickland’s cinema. For both, the act and representation of screaming is bound up closely with cruelty (an ambiguous and multivalent term within their writing, drama and imagery), space, dis-embodiment, the search for and evanescence of personal subjectivity, and identity.

***

Strickland’s first major film Katalin Varga (2009) is the story of Katalin, the eponymous Romanian-Hungarian woman who is ostracised by her husband and community when it is revealed she has been raped and the parentage of her young son, Orbán, is called into question. She sets off on a doomed, picaresque journey, by horse and cart across the landscape of the Carpathian Mountains in order to confront her rapist (this doom-laden quest bears the influence of Thomas Hardy in the bleakness of its representation of rural life and landscape). Her quest takes her through violent, rural communities to the heart of his family home, where we learn that he is apparently not a monster but a loving and remorseful family man. The Scream presented in Katalin Varga is prophetic of the trauma to come and haunts the soundtrack, or soundscape, of the film. It takes the form of non-diegetic ghostly, reverberating, distant howls, moans and screams, layered one on top of the other, a harmony of choral voices and electronic sound. The Scream occurs as she and Orbán cross the landscape, blowing across the surface of both the landscape and the film itself like the wind, turning it into a haunted space. In his review in The Independent, critic Jonathan Romney observed:

The film’s most overly offbeat aspect is its soundtrack, with an other-worldly score, part choral, part electronic, by Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox, and a genuinely enigmatic sound design: the climactic tragedy is announced, unnervingly, by an insistent tapping, as if the local woodpeckers are getting restless.[8]

However, the scream embedded into the film’s soundtrack starkly contrasts with the long periods of silence, as well as with the seeming inertia of the film’s characters. Scholar Jean Martin observes of Strickland’s films that “Strickland doesn’t put dialogue at the centre of his films. This creates space for the audio—visual elements”.[9] One of the distinctive aspects of Strickland’s work is the way in which diegetic sounds are pushed high in the sound mix, amplified and intensified, almost to the point becoming part of, if not the non-diegetic soundtrack. In Katalin Varga, the abstract sounds of the landscape replace conventional soundtrack music, and the layered textures of the scream ironically confer upon it a musicality. The emphatic presence of diegetic sound is also central to Strickland’s next film Berberian Sound Studio. Jean Martin, in his article “Landscape, Soundscape, Taskscape in the films The Hurt Locker (2008), Katalin Varga (2009)” makes a number of salient observations, suggesting that:

The composers Geoffrey Cox and Steven Stapleton succeed in metaphorically evoking Katalin’s inner world of thoughts and emotions through electroacoustic soundscapes. Often these scenes are acoustically set in a bath of strongly manipulated voice drones. The large, but slightly dark, sonic space is a symbol for Katalin’s mental state, which has been darkened through the traumatic experience of her rape as a young woman… This inner sonic space of Katalin is occasionally inhabited by her voice: she whispers fragments of an inner monologue. This enormous soundscape in surround, a metaphor for Katalin’s dreams and hopes, collapses abruptly into mono, when Katalin is catapulted back into the film reality… A good example for the metaphorical use of a sound is an open fire during a rural dance party. Music and other location sounds fade away until we can only hear the intense cracking of the burning wood over the now familiar spheric electronic sounds as a metaphor for Katalin’s tension and turmoil.[10]

Katalin’s traumatised and hushed fragmentary inner dialogue reflects the textual presence of Samuel Beckett whose dramatic writing, particularly, in his later, shorter dramas (from the mid 1960s)  deals with the inner monologue of the characters and its traumatised, verbal articulation. In Katalin Varga, Katalin’s moment of traumatised verbal exposition occurs when she reveals, in monologue (a la Beckett), the experience of her rape to her unwitting rapist and his wife when out rowing,  a scene which will eventually lead to the wife’s suicide and to her own final, sudden, brutal murder.

Screaming is a psychologically, emotionally and physically exhausting act. In Beckett’s dramatic monologue Not I, each piercing and painful scream emitted by ‘Mouth’ is in response to her failed attempt to rationalise and articulate the traumatic events of her existence, and to reclaim some her own evanescing subjectivity. In this monologue a disembodied ‘Mouth’, lacking any other physical form, hangs in an empty void of darkness. Identity is tied to physical presence and the inability to realise and recognise personal subjectivity leads to a complete erasure of the self. Each scream is met with, that most Beckettian of tropes, the anguished pause. In Breath (1969), a 25-second-long piece, a single disembodied cry is followed by the inhalation and exhalation of breath echoing across a stage strewn with rubbish.

Strickland’s three major films to date[11], in particular Berberian Sound Studio, explore not only the scream and its containment but also the detritus of that scream: silence. Berberian Sound Studio we follow Gilderoy, an unassuming and withdrawn sound engineer as he travels to an Italian sound studio from his home in Dorking, fresh from mixing the sound for a nature documentary about his native Box Hill, to do post-production work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex. He wrongly assumes this to be a film about horses, where in fact the Mephistophelian (Satanic imagery pervades the film) production supervisor Francesco, informs him, on arrival, that it’s a violent Giallo horror film about the revenge of a group of undead witches, featuring graphic depictions of human torture and sadistic cruelty (hair wrenching, mutilation and sexual violation with a red-hot poker).

During the film the scream is trapped and contained via the medium of tape[12] while the screamers are encased within their sound booths, open mouthed, screaming but silent (as if anguished by the very act of having their scream torn from them). Like the suggested, but unseen, red hot poker within the film’s meta narrative, disembodied screams perforate, rip and penetrate the fabric of the film and they echo across the ‘haunted’ spaces: the studio at the centre of the film as well as the “film within a film”(“The Equestrian Vortex”), at the centre of the narrative. Screams are part of the architecture of this film, and depictions of evanescence, decay and putrification proliferate across the films as the camera lingers over images of vegetables left to rot after being discarded from the Foley desk where they have been used to create the sound effects to images of torture and suffering.

Figure 1: a screamer in Berberian Sound Studio,  bearing resemblance to the images of screaming in the paintings of  Francis Bacon

In The Duke of Burgundy, a film which centres around the co-dependent, BDSM, relationship of a Lepidopterist and her housemaid, the scream manifests itself as the synthesised pitch of a cricket moth (a sound usually inaudible to the human ear). In one key sequence during the lecture given by Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), she identifies the pitch (scream) as a maker of identity and subjectivity. The pitch, modulated and synthesised, for human aural consumption, plays both diegetically and non-diegetically across the film as the camera pans across an inert and impassive female audience (among whom are placed mannequins both in homage to Fassbinder’s film, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, (1972) a similar tale of a co-dependent female sexual relationship), and as meta-textual objects of power and control.[13] In Katalin Varga, the scream emerges as an extra-diegetic howl which echoes across the surface of the film as Katalin and her son travel, by cart, across the desiccated Carpathian landscape. In all three films, the scream emits from both within the diegesis and is imposed on top of it. Technology is used to control and contort its pitch, volume, direction. If the scream is an automatic and instinctual response, here, in Strickland’s films, it is also artificially controlled, synthesised and manipulated.

***

Jean Martin has broken critical ground on the cinema of Peter Strickland. In discussing the innovative nature of Strickland’s films, Strickland’s work as a sound artist and the individual soundscapes/soundtracks used in the three films, Martin observes:

Strickland’s audio-visual aesthetic emerges from his choice of topics and the way he tells stories in his films. He deals with complex ideas and the emotional effects on the protagonists, for example injustice, revenge, freedom, power, love and fear, or the nature of repetition. Strickland is not interested in action. Instead he creates audio-visual tableaux, where a situation and protagonist’s mood is shown almost out of time. He creates space and time for these situations, using strong images, for example mysterious forest borders in dim light, accompanied by long, complex musical drones or ambient music.[14]

In Peter Strickland’s films the scream does not simply function as a piece of cinematic horror furniture. In fact his films show an ambiguous relationship to the genre. They certainly appropriate horrific imagery, tropes and motifs, moments of cruelty and sadism (both consensual and non-consensual) but they also refer back to a set of art-cult texts (see below), deliberately problematising the issue of genre. In his films, the scream is unpacked and interrogated as an expression of human trauma, as a main component of horror cinema. This is particularly true in Berberian Sound Studio for its abstract, sonic nature and musicality.  Here the scream draws together two seemingly opposite traditions: the popular (and cult) with the experimental and avant-garde where in both, as I have already discussed, it has a clear presence. Strickland’s films exist at the intersection of art and exploitation cinema[15], as do many of his cinematic points of reference.

Furthermore, the narratives and mise-en-scène of these films also exist in a vacuum: temporally displaced and locked ‘out of time’. In Berberian Sound Studio, the close-ups of antiquated sound-mixing equipment and tape recorders as well as its narrative that revolves around the sound editing and post production of a violent Italian Giallo horror film could suggest that the film is narratively located in the 1970s. The film, like the studio itself, is a hermetically sealed and haunted space; the scream here is a ghostly presence which reverberates across it signifying something both present and absent.

Katalin Varga also feels disconnected from any contemporary setting. Its rural location and setting anchors it to numerous cinematic and artistic traditions, including that of folk horror cinema. The film’s soundscape is suggestive of a ghostly, haunted landscape. The rural setting and landscape, this author argues, is also indicative of a traumatised post-communist Romania still locked in the past, unable to fully catch up with the present. The film’s seeming location in the past is also re-enforced by the reference to 19^th century European realist painting[16] as well as the use of Caravaggesque[17] interior lighting and chiaroscuro.

In The Duke of Burgundy, the enclosed female world of the film is stylistically located within the milieu of both the 1970s European female melodrama and erotic exploitation film. In an interview, Strickland cited the influence of both Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jess Franco’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973). Strickland’s film, offers the viewer a set of composed tableaux (owing as much in this respect to Kubrick as Fassbinder and Franco). Furthermore, Beckett’s presence is felt here too. Cynthia’s daily routine of ablutions recalls that of Winnie in Happy Days (1961) (as she, buried up to her waste in sand, unpacks her toothbrush and other items to begin ‘another happy day.’) Like Winnie, Waiting for Godot’s (1949) Vladimir and Estragon, Krapp (Krapp’s Last Tape 1958) and other Beckett characters, both women at the heart of the film are locked in a cyclical relationship and narrative: the film ends as it begins.

Strickland’s films anticipate the current zeitgeist in contemporary horror cinema in which narratives, particularly post-modern narratives, reference and pay homage to a set of European and American cinematic horror as well as cult-horror traditions, and which are temporally dislocated and ambiguous: David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) or Carol Morley’s Ken Russell-esque The Falling (2014), are all examples of this trend in which the worlds of the films stylistically and deliberately reference the cinematic style of the past, but remain hermetically sealed off from both past and present (or become a space in which the two collide). The Love Witch, for instance, homages the European erotic exploitation cinema of the late 1960s and 1970 in its overall style, performance, colour scheme and mise-en-scène. In interviews Biller has cited a range of diverse sources as points of reference including not only Russ Meyer, Mario Bava and Jess Franco, but also Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michael Powell.[18] Yet in the film, characters anachronistically use modern day mobile phones.

However locating Strickland as part of this new wave of directors—whose work seeks to locate itself within a milieu of cult art and exploitation cinema—is to an extent somewhat problematic, given that his films engage with the horror genre as part of a much wider matrix of experimental and cultural influences and points of reference (see below).  If directors such as Ben Wheatley explicitly set out to homage the horror tropes of British cinema, or Nicolas Winding Refn, with a film such as The Neon Demon (2016) which appropriates the Gialli style by hybridising it with more than a touch of Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell, then Strickland’s work aims to meta-textually deconstruct and interrogate the mechanics and apparatus of this cinema rather than simply homage. His films inhabit a niche network of cultural texts in which screaming and the scream itself are central. In these texts, screams are not simply part of the narrative furniture, they are the central drive of the film frequently displacing and replacing the narrative. Strickland consciously appropriates a visual intellectual avant-garde tradition of the mid 20^th century in which the scream negotiates debates over disembodiment, identity and subjectivity.

Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England (2014) provides an interesting point of contemporary comparison in its rendering of the scream. Alchemist’s assistant Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), is tortured off-screen by rival alchemist O’Neill (Michael Smiley). From within the tent we hear a prolonged ear splitting scream followed by silence during which Whitehead emerges from the tent, tethered by a long rope, catatonic, and with a terrifying grin on his face. Here again the scream is contrasted with a painful silence, and furthermore the image of Whitehead tied to a rope being led by O’Neill arguably recalls the image of master/slave Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett’s seminal drama of the absurd Waiting For Godot. Wheatley’s film recalls imagery from Waiting for Godot on several occasions. Given Strickland’s own concern within Beckettian imagery and the themes of circularity, repetition, physical containment this is particular relevant, as I shall discuss with reference to the The Duke of Burgundy. We may hypothesise that 21^st century horror cinema is more and more looking to the absurd and to the ‘horrific’ imagery inherent in Beckett’s work as a point of reference.

***

Turning now to a fuller discussion of the film Berberian Sound Studio, it is firstly worth noting that in an interview with Cinema-Scope[19] Strickland has acknowledged a wider set of somewhat esoteric and experimental influences over his approach to sound, voice—and therefore the scream—in film; the 20^th century post-modernist sound artist and mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian and her work with Luciano Berio; Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra; the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Kristof Penderecki (whose De natura sonoris No. 1 (1966) also featured prominently as part of the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining); free jazz and Musique concrète.

In this interview Strickland discusses the relevance of Berberian to his work and acknowledges the crossover between the experimental sound art of 1970s and the world of the exploitation film:

You could find links between them at somewhere like the Studio di Fonologia, which was Luciano Berio’s studio in Milan. He was also the husband of Cathy Berberian, and part of what sparked all the whole film was my listening to “Visage,” a track they did together in 1961. It’s about 20 minutes of howling and just sounds very possessed. It was never in a horror film, but I got to thinking, what if it was? I was also thinking of people like Bruno Maderna, who was hanging out with John Cage and Luigi Nono but also doing soundtracks to things like Death Laid an Egg (1968). Or even Ennio Morricone, who was part of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, which was like the Italian version of AMM [a long-lived British free improvisation group]. So you had this weird connection between the high art, academic or experimental music, and exploitation soundtracks.[20]

Visage is a piece comprised of glossolalia, howls, and screams overlaying a ghostly emptiness influenced directly by the later recorded work of Antonin Artaud, notably his final work To Have Done with The Judgement of God (1947), which is an apocalyptic and fragmentary recording for radio where the voice is interspersed with guttural cries, piercing shrieks and screams, glossailia and bruitages. At one point in Berberian Sound Studio, we see and hear one of the female voice artists vocalising a barrage of abstract noises, howls and shrieks, in the manner of both Berberian and Artaud. It can be argued that in this shot Strickland writes Berberian herself into the film.

Artaud intended to use the recording and the medium of radio to invade the private space of the listener at home. It was the final act in an ongoing project for the Theatre of Cruelty. In his first manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty Artaud stated:

There can be no spectacle without an element of cruelty. In our present degenerative state metapsychics must be made to enter the mind through the body.[21]

Artaud’s biographer Stephen Barber describes Artaud’s radio recording thus:

Artaud’s final recording is a polyphony of screams and language, of assonant and obtuse rhythms, of insurgent elements of chance, and of outbursts of a black, apocalyptic laughter which mocks religion…The Scream is at the core of Artaud’s recording: it emerges from, projects and visualises the body. In the space of the recording the interaction between Artaud’s scream and the silences which surround it work to generate a volatile and tactile material of sound, image and absence.[22]

If we are to consider the term ‘haunted’ a la Derrida (in his discussion of Hauntology, Derrida understands the haunting as something that is both present and absent) the recorded scream may fit this description. Artaud’s recording is a haunted space in which the scream is captured, disembodied from the screamer, and yet simultaneously set free. The scream, usually a reaction to cruelty, becomes part of the mechanics of cruelty.

We may add to this confluence of influence the work of television writer Nigel Kneale and director Jerzy Skolimowski and their experimental horror TV drama The Stone Tape (Kneale, 1975), and horror film The Shout (Skolimoski, 1978). In Nigel Kneale’s 1972 teleplay The Stone Tape (directed by Hammer stalwart Peter Sasdy), written for the BBC’s seasonal, annual, Ghost Stories for Christmas, the screaming apparition of a Victorian chambermaid reveals itself atop a set of stairs (which lead nowhere), to an electronics research group exploring new ways of recording sound (in the hope it will give them the lead over their Japanese competition). The ghoulish vision appears as a recorded (televisual) image superimposed upon the space around it like some indistinct, unstable signal from the past, both present and absent, and looped ad infinitum. The narrative reveals that in fact this vision is a recording of a terrifying past event embedded in the very stone of the old castle’s walls. In 2015 Strickland produced a radio adaptation of The Stone Tape, using new recording techniques and innovative binaural sound. By doing so, it not only acknowledged Kneale’s influence but also added a new layer of meta-textuality; a drama about an experiment with recording that unearths a previous ‘stone’ recording, re-written and adapted for the 21^st century using new innovative three-dimensional recording techniques.

Skolimowski’s The Shout, (1978) also deals with another withdrawn sound engineer and composer (John Hurt) intent on capturing the deadly aboriginal ‘terror’ shout which his mysterious guest (Alan Bates) claims to be able to unleash. Carson Lund observes:

Hurt is an independent experimental musician who is gradually shaken from his concentration by a mysterious Aboriginal brute capable of producing (with his own mouth!) a sound much purer than anything Hurt’s character has ever dreamed of. [Tony] Jones was in his early forties for Berberian Sound Studio and Hurt was in his late 30s when he shot The Shout, and together the films form a double-edged portrait of middle-aged men struggling for control—of their art, of meaning, and of themselves. Peter Strickland and Jerzy Skolimoswki’s films create deeply expressive aesthetic environments that compliment their characters’ contrasting trajectories, but in both cases, the lush visuals approximate only half the density and invention in the films’ soundtracks.[23]

Berberian Sound Studio is a complex web of converging narratives in which the line between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred, and the concentric narratives of the film fold into one another. In Berberian Sound Studio Gilderoy is required to mix the voices and the screams of the female voice artists (segregated from the rest of the studio in a confining sound booth) and do the foley work (smashing and attacking vegetables, sizzling oil, pulling out stems) to supply the sound effects for the gruesome and sadistic imagery on screen. The audience, however, is never privy to the imagery of The Equestrian Vortex, instead Strickland foregrounds the creation of the sound effects in the studio to create the image in our minds as the fruit and vegetables are brutally and violently violated and destroyed by the Fulci-esque foley artist, Massimo (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Massimo the Foley Artsist (Josef Cseres)

Confronted with the shocking violence he sees before him on the screen, his role in its perpetration, and his own isolation, Gilderoy’s identity begins to crumble and breakdown along with the identity of the film itself (in this respect Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970) is a clear point of reference). As the two narratives of the Berberian Sound Studio and its film within the film, The Equestrian Vortex, begin to bleed into one another. The sound studio itself becomes as a torture chamber with the producer and director, and latterly the increasingly complicit Gilderoy, as the torturers and the female voice artists their victims. The apparatus and mechanics of post-production (feedback played directly into ear pieces for instance) are used sadistically and intensively to impose the male creators will upon the female in the search for the perfect scream.

The film opens with a brief montage of imagery: film whirring through a projector, the blurred studio sign reading “Silenzio” (Figure 3) in demonic red warning letters. We first encounter Gilderoy at the beginning of the film, as he arrives at the studio. The film begins with a Beckettian exchange. He begins to ask the studio receptionist if she speaks English: “Do you speak…?” She abruptly cuts him off, “No”. This exchange is then followed by a piercing scream from the nearby studio where they are sound recording for the film. Here, the film establishes the destabilisation and displacement of rational articulation by the scream. In Beckett’s Not I,  “Mouth’s” scream punctuates a faltering and breathless attempt to express,  realise and articulate the facts of her traumatic existence and experience. Each scream is followed by the direction ‘silence.’ In Strickland’s film, the film’s narrative, and its screams, are also brutally punctuated by the shots of the studio warning lights ‘Silenzio’ (see below image.)

Figure 3: “SILENZIO”

The titles sequence of the film locates it within the realm of horror cinema. With its blood red and black layered collage of violent occult imagery, the film homages not only 1970s European exploitation cinema but also references, aesthetically and stylistically, the title sequence of Michael Reeves’ seminal British folk horror film Witchfinder General (1968). The title sequence which opens the film, however, is that of The Equestrian Vortex.  Berberian Sound Studio has no title sequence, and the actors are not credited at this point. Hence from the very beginning of the film Strickland weaves together the film’s set of meta narratives.

Douglas Khan suggests that:

In their natural habitat screams are heard or experienced during momentous occasions: childbirth; life threatening situations (and those perceived as such); psychic or psychological torture, terror, anguish; sex expressed as pleasure or pain; the fury of an argument; the persecution and slaughter of animals. Screams demand an urgent or empathetic response and thereby create a concentrated social space bounded by their audibility… Even prolonged, agonized human screams, which press on the hearer’s consciousness convey only a limited dimension of the sufferers’ experience. It may be for this reason, that images of the human scream recur fairly often in the visual arts, which for the most part avoid depictions of auditory experience.[24]

The narrative space of cinema, by definition, cannot be a ‘natural habitat’ for the scream as within this space it is planned, strategized, calculated and carefully placed. In post-production, its intensity, range, length etc. is carefully controlled and manipulated in order to elicit a response from the viewer (empathy, terror, fright, sadness, nausea). Throughout Berberian Sound Studio we are reminded of the tension between screaming as a natural, physical, spontaneous and exhausting act and its pre-meditated implementation within the frame when at several key moments the camera fetishes and lingers over Gilderoy’s sound maps, flow charts, plans and notation. As the film progresses, and the meta narratives fold into one another, Gilderoy’s notes take on the appearance of post-modernist ‘musical’ notation, scientific notation and, significantly, occult symbols, forming themselves into satanic goat like visage (see Figure 4)

Figure 4: Gilderoy’s satanic sound chart

Furthermore, the camera fetishes the spinning spools of tape, the sound recording equipment; the alchemist’s tools (Gilderoy has almost occult mastery and power over sound). Within the meta-textual framework of the film, these machines will later become the instruments of torture used on the female voice artists. Throughout Berberian Sound Studio, Gilderoy is presented as both an Enlightenment scientist conducting experiments with sound (see Figure 5 which draws on the work of the 18^th century British artist Joseph Wright of Derby[25])  AND a black magician or alchemist with supernatural power and control of sound and voice.  At the start of the film on his meeting with production supervisor Francesco, he is beckoned into the studio and told “The world of sound awaits you… a world that requires all your magic powers”.

Figure 5: Gilderoy, the Enlightenment Scientist / Alchemist

Later, in one of the rare instances that we leave the studio, we are shown Gilderoy hunched over a spinning tape recorder in an image that recalls Beckett’s melancholic but comic play  Krapp’s Last Tape.  In the play, Krapp, an old man on his 70^th birthday, listens to recordings he has made in previous years, his memory contained within the spools of tape. Ulrika Maude writes in Beckett, Technology and The Body that,

The play’s temporal sedimentation is brought about by the manipulation of the tapes. The noises on stage mark the present tense, while the different dimensions of the past are conjured up by the recorded voice. Beckett wanted to ensure the body leaves its trace on the tape recording: he made the difference in voice quality explicit by indicating that the voice on tape should ‘clearly be Krapp’s at a much earlier time’.[26]

She cites scholar Katherine Hayles:

Katherine Hayles writes: ‘The play between the voices is an aural invitation to the audience to speculate on differences and similarities, across time and technology, even before the voices articulate words and sentences.’[27]

In Berberian Sound Studio, the image of Krapp hunched over his tape recorder is re-enacted by Gilderoy. These tapes, however, do not contain the memories of yesterday but the agonised, pained screams captured in the studio. The images of the antiquated tape recording equipment also cause the viewer to reflect upon cinematic and technological evolution, to bridge the gap between time and technology. The scream contained within displaces the Beckettian memory and its verbal, reasoned articulation (the voices contained on the tape of the younger Krapp are more articulate than his older self, who rarely speaks throughout the play other than to comically utter the word ‘Spooool’[28]), banishing it to without the tape as the camera picks up Gilderoy’s photographs pinned to the wall. Strickland uses similar imagery in The Duke of Burgundy prior to the scene in which Cynthia gives her lepidopterology lecture. Shots of Gilderoy’s hands at the mixing desk are replaced by shots of Cynthia looking into the tool of her trade, a microscope. Given the small number of films Strickland has made so far, they may be connected within an inter-textual matrix: both Hilda Petèr (Katalin Varga) and Chiara D’Anna (Evelyn in The Duke of Burgundy, Figure 6)) appear as screaming, tortured voice artists, as if Berberian Sound Studio is the point at which his first and most recent film collapse into.  Furthermore The Duke of Burgundy recalls imagery from Berberian Sound Studio, Gilderoy’s charts and sound maps are replaced by Cynthia’s butterfly charts. She too is at the centre of a struggle for power and control, but if Gilderoy by the end of the film is subsumed into it as torturer and wielder of power, then by the end of The Duke of Burgundy, conversely we are left to ask whether or not Cynthia is the one in a position of dominance in her relationship with the seemingly child-like and submissive Evelyn.

Figure 6: Chiara D’Anna, Berberian Sound Studio

Throughout 20^th and 21^st century visual culture, tape has been represented as a haunted medium, prone to erosion, deterioration and evanescence, the recorded image has been equated with the ghostly and haunted (consider Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998). Earlier we cited the influential example of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. In Berberian Sound Studio, tape has a similar supernatural presence. In one scene Gilderoy is seen to have set up an elaborate system of connected tape recorders spooling tape around the sound booth in order to achieve the desired recording affect. As the tape spools, the image of Gilderoy appears to flicker like a deteriorating recording, a fading image (see Figure 7 ).

Figure 7: Gilderoy appears as a recorded image

Jean Martin suggests the film’s titular studio is itself a “sterile” place, an unnatural environment or space for the scream to manifest itself. One of the most striking images is that of Gilderoy behind his mixing desk controlling and manipulating the screams of the voice actresses segregated and imprisoned in the sound booth. The musical director and the producer are perpetually unsatisfied by their efforts and  cruelly force them to repeat the act ad nauseaum.  Here Strickland’s thematic interest in power, control and subservience, later explored in The Duke of Burgundy, is apparent.  Beckett is concerned with the cruelty enacted on the performer by agents of creation and control, with the cruel processes of  theatre and bodily occupation (which is significant within the post war context of his own writing and personal experience).[29] In The Duke of Burgundy, Evelyn leaves explicit directions for how and when she is to be confined in the chest, the clothes Evelyn is to wear as they roleplay; Harold Pinter’s TV play  The Lover (ITV, 1962) I would argue is a point of reference for the sexual roleplay in the film. These explicit instructions remind us of the explicit and detailed stage directions and exertion of control that Beckett himself was famous for and which may be observed in the published notebooks and archived material at Reading University.

Furthermore cinema history is littered with male directors ‘torturing’ their female leads with endless, punishing takes:  Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds (1963) or the alleged treatment of Shelly Duvall by Stanley Kubrick during the filming of The Shining (1980).[30] In The Voice on Film, composer Michel Chion suggests that the “screaming point, in a male-directed film, immediately poses the question of mastery, of the mastery of this scream”[31], that male directed cinema is a  “Cinema of Sadists”[32] .

In Berberian Sound Studio the previously horrified and unwilling Gilderoy, in the final act is co-opted into acts of torture within the studio (which displace the violent images of torture in The Equestrian Vortex) when as Jean Martin describes:

To generate a genuine scream in the sterile environment of a recording studio is nearly impossible, so Corragio, the director and (reluctantly) Gilderoy have to take extreme measures to make the lead actress genuinely scream, by bullying or by technical means: at some point Gilderoy feeds a distorted unpleasant sound into her earphones and increases the volume to pain levels.[33]

Chion identifies, within the cinematic space, what he calls ‘The Screaming point’:

The scream generally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman [The scream he argues is therefore gendered]…above all it must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment at the crossroads of converging  plotlines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory but calculated to give maximum impact.[34]

In Berberian Sound Studio, Strickland problematises this idea by folding several layers of meta narrative into one another, making the  ‘screaming point’ more difficult to identify and locate. There are two narratives at work in the film which gradually fold into one another: the post production of The Equestrian Vortex and The Equestrian Vortex itself, which we, as viewers of the first narrative follow by proxy via the dialogue of the voice artists and more viscerally through the foley work. As Martin describes:

We hear the soundtrack and see the recording of new sounds. Stalks of  celery  are twisted for the sound of cracking bones, melons are smashed to represent the cracking of a human skull, and cabbage is stabbed. These acts of aggression are symbolic for the torture scenes on screen: the viewer sees fruit and vegetables, created by nature brutally destroyed. Equally, the natural human voice, spoken by female actresses, is tortured. The actresses are forced to repeat endlessly the screaming, which never satisfies the sadistic technical director.[35]

Chion, when writing about the Scream primarily is discussing Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) but what he writes is nevertheless applicable to an analysis of Berberian Sound Studio

[The Scream] becomes a sort of ineffable black hole toward which there converges an entire fantastic, preposterous, extravagant mechanism – the celebration, the political crime, the sexual murder and the whole film – all this made in order to be consumed and disrupted in the unthinkableness and instantaneity of the scream. The Screaming point is a point of the unthinkable inside the thought, of the indeterminate inside the spoken, of unrepresentability inside the representable. It occupies a point in time, but has no duration within it. It suspends the time of its possible duration, it’s a rip in the fabric of time. The Scream embodies a fantasy of the auditory absolute, it is seen to saturate the soundtrack and deafen the listener. It might even be unheard by the screamer.[36]

In one sequence, the ‘screaming point’ is deliberately pushed further out of reach as the the image diminishes with each successive shot (see Figures 8,9,10). We are shown the image of a female sound artist, encased in a glass box reminiscent of the paintings of Francis Bacon, whose scream is repurposed as a ghostly electronic sound. With each successive shot, the image is pushed further back into the depth of the frame, hanging, Beckett-like, in a black void.

Figures 8,9,10: the Diminshing Scream

The scream is more than just an instinctive physical response, it is metaphysical, it is not just a response to a cruel act but is in itself an act of cruelty in the way that it impinges on and invades the space of the listener. The scream in Berberian Sound Studio is the ‘black hole’ into which the film’s identity and Gilderoy’s identity are consumed.  The open-mouthed scream (which recalls the imagery of Beckett’s Not I) is juxtaposed with the all-consuming liquidizer on the Foley desk (Figures 11 and 12).  It vocalises the tension between the melting narratives of the film and The Equestrian Vortex, it is an agonised response to the film’s enforced separation of image whilst questioning the film’s status as a horror film.

Figures 11 and 12: Scream and Liquidizer

In Berberian Sound Studio, the studio itself becomes an enclosed and hermetic space of displacement, convergence and evanescence; an occult space in which the scream displaces language but where it is also rent apart from the screamer and where identity and subjectivity are thrown into crisis and collapse: an architecture of cruelty.

***

Over the course of this article, I have attempted to locate Peter Strickland’s work within a complex and extensive matrix of cultural texts that hold the scream at their centre. I would like to argue that while we might suggest that Strickland and his contemporary 21^st century horror directors may look back to past traditions and instances within the genre, Strickland’s work operates within a wider cultural matrix than most.  While there has been limited writing as yet around Strickland’s work, I have hoped to break new ground by recognising the presence of  both Samuel Beckett (and to a lesser extent Antonin Artaud) as a formative presence in his films. Strickland’s 21^st century cinematic screams are the vacuum (or Berberian Sound Studio’s liquidizer)  into which the cultural history of the scream in both popular horror and experimental culture is pulled into, broken down and interrogated  from a post-modern 21^st century perspective.

Notes

[1] Matthew Melia, “The Scream in Visual culture: The Scream as Fearful Response”  in Transforming Fear, Horror and Terror: Multidisciplinary Reflections, ed. Shona Hill and Shilinka Smith, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.Net Press, 2014

[2] Ibid.

[3] The reduction of language to speech like sounds, almost like speaking in tongues.

[4] Artaud’s project to disrupt western narrative theatre by creating a purely gestural theatre which would displace narrative and  attack the senses and psychology of the audience. Artaud believed spoken language and narrative was insufficient to contain and express the personal and social trauma. The first  (and only) manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty was his staging and adaptation of    Les Cenci in Paris, 1935. Deemed a failure, he would evolve his project for a Theatre of Cruelty across a number of mediums and throughout his nine year asylum incarceration. His final audio recording To Have Done With the Judgment of God, recorded not long before his death was to be the final iteration of this project – radio he felt was the ideal medium for this project  given its reach into the home.

[5]  Benjamin Wright “Favourite Moments of Film Sound: The Wilhelm Scream” Offscreen: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007, p.1

[6] Ibid. p.3

[7] Ibid, p.1.

[8] Jonathan Romney,  “Katalin Varga, Peter Strickland, 82 mins (5)” Independent,  Saturday October 19^th,  2009,   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/katalin-varga-peter-strickland-82-mins-15-1800771.html  (Last accessed: 01/05/2017)

[9] Jean Martin, “Peter Strickland’s Film Soundtracks:  A World of Dreams, Nostalgia and Fear”  Glissando (2015), Vol 26 (Soundscape), p. 160-167 (here p.5)  http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/13872/1/Martin%20-%20Strickland_soundtracks-Glissando2015.pdf   (Last accessed:  01/05/2017)

[10] Jean  Martin, “Landscape, Soundscape and  Taskscape in the films The Hurt Locker (2008) and Katalin Varga (2009)”  The New Soundtrack, Volume 3 Issue 2, p.131,   http://www.soundbasis.eu/pdfs/Martin-Soundscape2013.pdf   (Last accessed:  01/05/2017)

[11] I am  excluding from this discussion the 2014 Bjork concert film Biophilia Live

[12] Another reference to Beckett which I will discuss in more detail later

[13] Fassbinder’s film, Strickland has admitted (in the BFI article “ Peter Strickland: Six Films that Influenced the Duke of Burgundy” (http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/peter-strickland-six-films-fed-duke-burgundy, last viewed: 14/05/2017)  was a direct influence on the plot.  Fassbinder positions these mannequins, subjects of control, across the mise-en-scene of the film, and Strickland does similar in homage. We might also note here that Beckett’s 1982 play Catastrophe,  also deals  with power and control in a similar way – the body of an actor (“protagonist” becomes an inert  mannequin for the whims of  “Director” who exerts direct control over every physical movement of  the body.

[14] Jean Martin, “Peter Strickland’s Film Soundtracks:  A World of Dreams, Nostalgia and Fear”  Glissando (2015), Vol 26 (Soundscape), p. 160-167,   http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/13872/1/Martin%20-%20Strickland_soundtracks-Glissando2015.pdf   (Last accessed: 01/05/2017)

[15] Katalin Varga echoes the rape-revenge film popular as part of the  1970s exploitation milieu; Berberian Sound Studio, one might argue could be considered a ‘neo-Giallo’ film and The Duke of Burgundy is informed not only by Fassbinder but also by the erotic European exploitation cinema of the late ‘60s through into the 1970s.

[16]  In Jean-François Millet’s (1814-1875) painting The Gleaners (1857) , for instance,  the landscape is depicted as a desiccated place with slim pickings for the poor as they are left to pick up what’s left of the harvest.

[17] In the style of the Italian Baroque artist Michaelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio (1571-1610). A defining feature of his work is the use of internal light sources and contrasting shades of shadow and light: chiaroscuro

[18] Rodrigo Perez, “The Movies that Changed My Life, The Love Witch director Anna Biller”, The Playlist, http://theplaylist.net/love-witch-director-anna-biller-movies-changed-life-20161110/ (Last accessed:  01/05/2017)

[19] Jason Anderson, “No Sound Is Innocent: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio”, Cinemascope, http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/no-sound-is-innocent-peter-stricklands-berberian-sound-studio/  (Last Accessed:  01/05/2017)

[20] Ibid.

[21] Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and It’s Double,  London: Calder Press, 2001,  p.77.

[22]Stephen Barber, Artaud: The Screaming Body ,London:  Creation Books,  pp. 97-98, 1999.

[23] Carson Lund, “Notebook’s 5th Writers Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2012” https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/notebooks-5th-writers-poll-fantasy-double-features-of-2012  (Last accessed:  01/05/2017)

[24]  Douglas Khan, Noise, Water, Meat, A History of Sound in The Arts, London: MIT press, 2001,  p.346

[25] See the paintings Experiment with a Bird in an Air Pump (1768), The Alchemist (1771) and The Orrery (1766)

[26] Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and The Body, Cambridge: CUP, 2009,  p.63

[27] Ibid..

[28] Samuel Beckett, “ Krapp’s Last Tape” in Samuel Beckett: the Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber & Faber, 1990, p.216

[29] In the 1973 Royal Court production of Not I, with actress Billie Whitelaw in the role of “Mouth”, Beckett demanded that the actress be strapped to a chair unable to move, with gauze keeping her head in place (this would lead in part to Whitelaw having a breakdown).   Also see endnote 13.

[30]  Kubrick famously put actor Murray Melvin through 57 takes of one scene during the filming of Barry Lyndon.

[31] Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (trans. Claudia Gorbman), NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.78.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Jean Martin, “Peter Strickland’s Film Soundtracks:  A World of Dreams, Nostalgia and Fear”  Glissando (2015), Vol 26 (Soundscape), p. 160-167 (here p.5)  http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/13872/1/Martin%20-%20Strickland_soundtracks-Glissando2015.pdf   (Last accessed: 01/05/2017)

[34] Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (trans. Claudia Gorbman), NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.77.

[35] Jean Martin, “Peter Strickland’s Film Soundtracks:  A World of Dreams, Nostalgia and Fear”  Glissando (2015), Vol 26 (Soundscape), p. 160-167,  http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/13872/1/Martin%20-%20Strickland_soundtracks-Glissando2015.pdf    (Last accessed:  01/05/2017)

[36] Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (trans. Claudia Gorbman),  NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.76

Notes on Contributor

Dr Matthew Melia is a Senior lecturer in film and television at Kingston University. His PhD was on Architecture and Cruelty in the work of Beckett, Genet and Artaud and he teaches on modules ranging from light entertainment television, broadcasting history, science fiction film and TV and cult film. He also specialises in the work of Ken Russell and Stanley Kubrick.

Bibliography

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and It’s Double, London: Calder Press, 2001, p.77.

Benjamin Wright “Favourite Moments of Film Sound: The Wilhelm Scream” Offscreen: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007.

Carson Lund, “Notebook’s 5th Writers Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2012” https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/notebooks-5th-writers-poll-fantasy-double-features-of-2012 (Last accessed: 01/05/2017)

Douglas Khan, Noise, Water, Meat, A History of Sound in The Arts, London: MIT press, 2001, p.346.

Jason Anderson, “No Sound Is Innocent: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio”, Cinemascope http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/no-sound-is-innocent-peter-stricklands-berberian-sound-studio/ (Last accessed: 01/05/2017).

Jean Martin, “Landscape, Soundscape and Taskscape in the films The Hurt Locker (2008) and Katalin Varga (2009)” The New Soundtrack, Volume 3 Issue 2, p.131. http://www.soundbasis.eu/pdfs/Martin-Soundscape2013.pdf (Last accessed: 01/05/2017).

Jean Martin, “Peter Strickland’s Film Soundtracks: A World of Dreams, Nostalgia and Fear” Glissando (2015), Vol 26 (Soundscape), p. 160-167 http://eprints.brighton.ac.uk/13872/1/Martin%20-%20Strickland_soundtracks-Glissando2015.pdf (Last accessed: 01/05/2017).

Jonathan Romney, “Katalin Varga, Peter Strickland, 82 mins (5)” Independent, Saturday October 19th, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/films/reviews/katalin-varga-peter-strickland-82-mins-15-1800771.html (Last accessed: 01/05/2017)

Matthew Melia, “The Scream in Visual culture: The Scream as Fearful Response” in Transforming Fear, Horror and Terror: Multidisciplinary Reflections, ed. Shona Hill and Shilinka Smith, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.Net Press, 2014.

Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (trans. Claudia Gorbman), NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.76.

Rodrigo Perez, “The Movies that Changed My Life, The Love Witch director Anna Biller”, The Playlist, http://theplaylist.net/love-witch-director-anna-biller-movies-changed-life-20161110/ (Last accessed 01/05/2017).

Samuel Beckett, “ Krapp’s Last Tape” in Samuel Beckett: the Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber & Faber, 1990, p.216.

Stephen Barber, Artaud: The Screaming Body, London: Creation Books, 1999, pp. 97-98,.

Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and The Body, Cambridge: CUP, 2009, p.63.

Filmography

Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, USA, 1951)

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (R.W.Fassbinder, Germany, 1972)

A Virgin Among The Living Dead (Jesus Franco, Spain, 1973)

The Shout (Jerzy Skomlimowski, UK, 1978)

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA, 1981)

Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983, USA)

Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, UK/Romania, 2009)

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK, 2012)

The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, UK, 2014)

A Field In England (Ben Wheatley, UK, 2014

It Follows (David Mitchell, USA, 2014)

The Falling (Carol Morley, UK, 2014)

The Neon Demon (Nicholas Winding Refn, France/USA/Denmark, 2016)

The Love Witch (Anna Biller, USA, 2017)

Television

The Lover (Harold Pinter, UK, ITV, 1962)

The Stone Tape (Peter Sasdy, UK, BBC, 1975)