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)

 During the 1980s and ‘90s, the concept of VR hit “the mass brainstem like a rush of crack, the term rapidly took on the millennialist charge of all pop futurisms”^[1].

Science-fiction films such as Brainstorm (1983) and The Lawnmower Man (1992) through to manga and anime series Sword Art Online (2009), depicted visions of the future potential of VR in which people used technology to upload themselves into virtual worlds. For many, the dream of the ultimate VR experience was “a transcendence of the limits of physical reality”^[2] – a transportation into new universes beyond the laws of our own. More than thirty years later, studios, filmmakers and animators are now working in increasing numbers to understand and unleash the potential of the first wave of home VR systems. VR represents an unprecedented paradigm shift in most aspects of the media production process as well as the technical platforms for its consumption; with boundless possibilities.

While speculation is rife about its potential for different media and genres, it would appear based on the history of major innovations in screen media that a new, intensified dimension of horror is assured. I argue that the key transformative characteristics of VR – its unprecedented immersion and first-person interactivity – are best suited to horror ahead of all other genres. Horror is a body genre, to cite Carol Clover’s term, built on immersion, physicality and the suspension of disbelief. Linda Williams argues that horror, melodrama and pornography are all body genres in which “the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body”^[3]. Horror’s trademark is its ability to give the body “an actual physical jolt”^[4]; for the viewer to vicariously become paranoid of their own safety, to feel goosebumps in response to their dread and suspense, and to literally jump out of their seat. VR amplifies these reactions – these innate pleasures of horror – by its corporeality: the participant’s own body reciprocally interacting with the VR universe and all its grisly manifestations. VR instantly achieves what some of the great innovators in filmmaking have strived for, often in ingenious and surprising ways, since the dawn of cinema: to transport the viewer beyond the physical boundary of the two-dimensional screen to another place, for an embodied, sensory and participatory experience. These three facets of audience experience are the ingredients needed to create what I describe as “experiential media”: an experience that immerses the senses and allows direct participation; not a passive screening but an event in which the audience is a part of the diegesis. VR surpasses all previous screen-based experiential media with full-immersion, first-person interactivity; we’ve never experienced it before, except in real life.

Perhaps ironically but precisely because it is new and transformative, VR has revived and reinvented the “cinema of attractions” – the term coined by Tom Gunning to distinguish the very earliest cinema from the narrative-based films that predominated from 1906. Gunning describes the cinema of attractions as, “less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power (whether the realistic illusion of motion offered to the first audiences by Lumière, or the magical illusion concocted by Méliès), and exoticism”^[5]. Gunning emphasises what he calls an emblematic aspect of early cinema: “the recurring look at the camera by actors. This action, which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema, is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience”^[6]. From “comedians smirking at the camera, to the constant bowing and gesturing of the conjurors in magic films” it was this direct address of the audience “in which an attraction is offered to the spectator by a cinema showman, that defines this approach to filmmaking…emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe”^[7].

Throughout the history of entertainment, experiential horror has repeatedly employed new technical innovations in attempts to reignite audience fervour for the horror genre as a participatory spectacle. Filmmakers can now do far more than acknowledge their audience, they can invite them inside the diegesis. Stepping into the world of an experiential text is like entering an amusement park: participants are immersed in the magic and wonder of the media. This experience is epitomised in VR. VR users today, like the audiences of early cinema, are seeing places and spectacles for the first time and in ways that are unfamiliar to them. Whereas an actor’s look at the camera in early cinema may have been to invite applause or surprise, in VR such a direct look could be to question your next move as the main protagonist in a virtual world; the participant is directly interacted with as a character within the diegesis. We are now able to step into a limitless number of artificial universes and come face to face with all our favourite characters as well as yet unimagined villains and monsters. This has the potential to revolutionise the horror genre because in VR the monsters no longer only chase the characters on screen; now they’re coming after you. When watching a traditional horror film, you may feel the hairs bristling on the back of their neck or become paranoid about something lurking behind the couch. In VR, there may actually be something there. Characters and creatures are now able to invade your personal space. To stalk you, sneak up behind you and even attack you. You are no longer a voyeur hidden safely behind the screen; now, you are being watched.

This article explores some of the major innovations in experiential horror, the nature of their experiences, why they were successful; and their immediate relevance to understanding the potential of VR as the latest and perhaps greatest innovation in experiential media of any genre.

In postulating on VR’s potential impact on the horror genre, this article looks at a wide range of media, including interactive horror theatre, 3D, viral marketing, alternate reality games, film and television series, to contextualise VR within wider horror media and experiences and to postulate about the proven horror techniques that are likely to be reinvented or find new victims in VR universes.

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) systems use stereoscopic lenses to produce a screen-based, three-dimensional, artificial environment in which the user’s movements are tracked and his or her surroundings change in reaction to those movements. For example, when the wearer of a VR headset turns their head, the field of their vision turns in the same direction in the artificial environment in real time. This gives the viewer the sense of being present in a virtual world. The environment can be filmic, animated and/or computer-generated imagery (CGI). Some VR content is 180 degrees – the 3D environment extends in front of the viewer from his or her direct left and direct right, and vertically. Turning your head past your direct right or left or beyond vertical (that is, behind you) reveals blackness. Most VR content, however, is being produced in 360 degrees because this view enhances immersion by giving the impression of being located wholly, even bodily, inside the environment as opposed to being outside looking in. Due to the depth or dimensions of the environment being determined by the content (the video playing), the environment can appear to be infinitely small (a tiny space) or infinitely vast (outer space).

Some headsets have integral screen(s) and are attached to either a game console or a personal computer, whereas others are designed to be used with a compatible mobile phone which must be inserted into the headset, pre-loaded with a VR application and VR content. Some headsets provide sound and connectivity for related devices such as hand-held controllers and motion and location detection devices. A design priority of headsets should be to block out the real world which is a critical step towards achieving a sense of immersion or embodiment in a virtual world. Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy have described the importance of sensory immersion in reality substitution: “The blocking of sensory impressions from physical reality is a crucial part of the most compelling VR experiences. The senses are immersed in the virtual world; the body is entrusted to a reality engine”.^[8] Popular headsets include the Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR. Console and PC-based systems include Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Playstation VR. The different systems and content support varying means and levels of interactivity. In some experiences, participants can look around the environment while the scene plays but they cannot interact with the scene. In others, participants can navigate the environment using either a controller or by moving their body: lean forward to look outside windows or over the edge of a precipice; or bend down to look underneath objects, such as to see what is lurking under the bed, as in the VR game Boogeyman. Emerging technologies that stimulate the body to achieve a greater sense of presence and immersion in the virtual world include omnidirectional treadmills, data gloves and full-motion VR harnesses or rigs that can induce the sensation of flying (such as Icaros and Birdly).

The convergence of VR with other new technologies has the potential to further renew and transform VR and the horror genre in unprecedented and intimate ways. Before VR, horror media sought to engage audiences in a frightening tale concerning imaginary characters. Soon, through the use of personal online data, horror will be able to transport individual audience members into their own personal nightmares. Just as our personal browsing data is collected for targeted advertising, our data could be used to customise our virtual worlds. AI researcher Michael Cook has already described game-worlds populated with “people you know, the things they like doing, the places they visit and the relationships people have with one another”^[9]. A personalised horror universe – especially one in which you are trying to survive with representations of your real friends or family members – could have frightening consequences, as I will explore later in this article. An increasing gamification of horror media in VR also seems inevitable. Participants already have the ability to influence the story themselves, and could be given options as to where it leads like in a choose-your-own-adventure book. These developments will likely blur the distinctions in VR between what is cinema and gaming. Horror media and games are also likely to become more cinematic as a result of being produced for a spherical 360-degree universe.

Alex Barder, co-founder of VRWERX, the studio that created Paranormal Activity The Lost Souls VR game, has argued that “what VR horror has done has raised the bar on horror storytelling…if you’re still making a regular movie on a movie screen, you really have to work that much harder to compete with VR horror”^[10]. Recent films have demonstrated the power of traditional horror cinema as allegory and cultural expression, such as the cannibal film Raw (2017), a feminist coming-of-age story, and the record-breaking Get Out (2017), a commentary on white violence and racism towards African-Americans. Since the turn of the century, however, the genre has been flooded with remakes and sequels, many of which were widely considered to have added nothing new to the genre and were seen as “a pointless exercise in style”^[11] (Hantke – p.x), not matching the dread or suspense of the originals. In 2017 alone, remakes and sequels include: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Rings, Alien: Covenant, Amityville: Awakening, Underworld: Blood Wars, Annabelle 2, It, Flatliners, Chucky 7, Insidious: Chapter 4, Saw: Legacy, Dark Universe: The Mummy, World War Z 2, Wrong Turn 7, Suspiria, Hellraiser: Judgement, Jeepers Creepers 3: Cathedral, Children of the Corn: Runaway and Halloween. It is likely that filmmakers and studios will embrace the opportunity to recreate past successes for VR because of their pre-existing audience and hence relative financial security. It may well be that these sequels and remakes, reimagined and recreated as they would have to be for a VR universe, will win new fans based on the spectacle of VR and also give existing fans the opportunity to experience (or play an active role for the first time) in their favourite horror franchises, more intensely and intimately than ever before.

I argue that VR will not replace traditional horror cinema but will act as a revolutionary alternative. Viewers sometimes desire a more passive viewing experience even in the horror genre which can be chilling, psychological and atmospheric instead of a lurching rollercoaster. VRWERX‘s other co-founder Russell Naftal explained: “We were right on track when my daughter tried out some of the game…She stopped – and she loves horror movies – and she said ‘I love them. I don’t want to be in them’”^[12]. This raises the point that VR horror may be too intense to be enjoyed all the time and when experiences are too extreme, it may result in alienating some audiences. It also introduces the question: Could VR horror be too shocking for entertainment? Audiences and critics, however, have posed the same question throughout the history of horror and it continues to be divisive. Finally, there is more to the horror genre than simply startling its audience; it is one of the oldest and consistently popular genres and it its longevity could not have been built on jump scares alone. Horror can explore the human condition, act as historical or cultural allegory, reflect societal fears, and be as masterful as any other genre. I posit that traditional horror cinema is an art-form which will continue to be prolific for the foreseeable future. It may be that some horror stories are still best told in the cinema, just as other genres are likely to find a use for VR to tell particular stories best experienced bodily.

A Glimpse Into the History of Experiential Horror

Horror experiences that include the audience as part of the diegesis predate cinema. For centuries, storytellers, inventors, magicians and showmen have experimented with experiential horror techniques to blur the line between reality and imagination. While the history of experiential horror is not a linear timeline, it is useful to look at some of its key innovations in order to understand what current VR technology is both drawing and building upon. I have selected as examples of experiential horror:

• the phantasmagoria – perhaps the earliest immersive, technological horror experience and like VR, encapsulated its audience in an interactive horror universe
• 3D – to acknowledge the constraints in innovations in experiential horror when confined to the two-dimensional screen; and
• viral marketing – to illustrate the impact horror monsters have had on participants and the genre after crossing the threshold into the “real world”.

Phantasmagoria

Grimod de la Reynière, a famous gastronome, could have been describing contemporary VR when he reported his visit to the phantasmagoria:

“The illusion is certainly complete. The total darkness of the location of the scene, the choice of the figures, the astonishing magic of their truly terrifying graduation…all come together to strike your imagination and to take all your observational senses. Reason may tell you that they are just phantoms, artfully devised, skilfully performed and cleverly presented catoptical tricks, but your shattered brain only believes what it is made to see, and we believe we have been transported into another world and other ages”.^[13]

Beginning in the late 18^th century, the phantasmagoria was possibly the first technologically immersive horror experience: a form of theatre which used magic lanterns to project spectral images. To hide the screen and to create the illusion that ghosts were materialising in the air, the images were often projected onto “a curtain of smoke” or transparent screen, bounced off an “inclined mirror”^[14]. The projected image could appear to travel across the screen, “burst from the rear of the canvas” and move towards the audience “at astonishing speed” before abruptly disappearing^[15]. The images were also often accompanied by sound effects. A showman named Robertson included the gimmick of having assistants who walked amongst the audience “in the dark wearing paper-mache masks lit from the inside”^[16]. This reportedly managed to startle at least one spectator who hit one of the assistants with a walking stick, expecting to “strike empty air”^[17]. Phantasmagoria shows were often used to conjure images of the dead. Generally, these were famous people, but also anyone recently deceased if the showman could be provided with a portrait at least a few days prior to the event. They were also able to create doppelgängers of the living; as one journalist reported: “I saw myself walking up and down and trembling before me!”^[18].
Many other immersive horror experiences followed, including the Grand-Guignol; a Parisian horror theatre renowned for its violence, gore and terror. The theatre was claustrophobic; the audience sitting near the stage and its actors known to make eye contact with the audience to create a feeling of complicity in the violent acts. Then there were 1950s showmen such as William Castle, who literally let his films loose into the cinema with flying skeletons, vibrating seats and a monster that could only be pacified by screaming. From campfire-lit ghost stories to haunted houses, there are vast examples of experiential horror throughout the history of entertainment in which audiences have been included as part of the diegesis.
3D

In contrast with the countless forgotten gimmickry of 1950s horror cinema, one innovation that continues to be reinvented and find renewed popularity is 3D. 3D films are shot with two lenses positioned slightly apart (roughly the distance between the human eyes), and the two recordings are projected to the screen through polarised filters of different orientations (angles of polarisation). The 3D effect is created by the polarised glasses worn by the audience: each lens only permits light of the same orientation to pass through it, so that the audience sees one polarized image in each eye. The human brain interprets the slight difference between the two images as being caused by distance from the subject and effectively knits the two images together as one to create the illusion of depth. Films such as House of Wax (1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), have become iconic, however, their pioneering use of 3D effects is largely forgotten. Since the 1980s, 3D has most often been used in horror to renew interest in a film franchise, with sequels that are generally inferior to the originals, such as Jaws 3D (1983), Amityville 3D (1983), Final Destination 5 (2011) and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015). When asked about the horror-comedy film Piranha 3D (2010), James Cameron said:

“I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s...When movies got to the bottom of their barrel of their creativity and the last few gasps of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.^”[19]

3D has had great success in blockbuster films, especially in sci-fi and fantasy genres where it is used to showcase the detail of the CGI universe. While 3D horror is an enduring spectacle, it fails to achieve immersion. Rather than break down the 4^th wall, I would argue that its flying weapons and body parts merely warp the screen before bouncing back into their own universe. Instead of drawing the viewer into the film world, these effects float into a “liminal space in front of the screen” which “creates a chasm between the film’s world and the spectators”^[20]. 3D horror films are polarising, some viewers are excited by the experience while others claim that the effects irritate their vision. There are also some stereoblind viewers who are unable to perceive 3D but are able to experience VR. For viewers that embrace 3D, the experience can engage the body as well as create new thrilling forms of spectacle in kill scenes as weapons hurtle towards the viewer or pierce through the onscreen character to create an optical explosion of blood and gore. These experiences, however, seem to be best enjoyed infrequently and while spectacular, tend to produce a self-reflexive, comedic effect – bringing to attention the film’s artifice. 3D horror so far has not been used to immerse audiences in horror’s universes. This is possibly due to the constraints of budget, comparative lack of CGI and/or horror’s tendency to be set in relatable real world locations. VR, however, aims to conceal all signs of mediation to plunge the participant into the scene. Participants are able to explore and become immersed in the experience’s setting, rather than mainly focusing on the special effects. 3D horror offers a unique aesthetic and participatory experience, however, it seems likely that its fans are ready to move onto the next level visual and sensory assault potentials of VR.

Viral Marketing 

The monsters and mythology of horror have found ways to creep into our reality – long before we have been remotely transported into theirs. One of the most historic examples of horror permeating our reality were the orchestrated events leading up to the release of The Blair Witch Project (1999). The found footage film was marketed like a documentary. At the film’s premiere at Sundance Film Festival, fliers featured photos of the film’s three stars underneath the headline ‘MISSING’, with information about their alleged disappearance^[21]. In the lead-up to the film’s release, a special named Curse of the Blair Witch (1999), was aired on cable television, which included “interviews with law enforcement officials, inhabitants of the film’s setting and ‘newsreel’ footage of a character alluded to in the film, a child-murderer named Rustin Parr”^[22]. The film’s website further perpetuated the film’s mythology and included constructed “police reports, interviews with the ‘missing’ filmmakers’ parents” and “a timeline on the mythology of the Blair Witch extending back to the eighteenth century”^[23]. Spread mainly by discussion in online chatrooms, the website became not only “the most-accessed film website of the year, but according to Nielsen NetRatings was among the top fifty most used sites on the entire Internet during the week preceding the film’s national release”^[24]. The film earned almost $250 million in the box office worldwide – almost 10,000 times its production budget, making it the most profitable horror film of all time^[25]. It was only overtaken by Paranormal Activity (2007), another found footage film that utilised online marketing to promote its immersion by recording frightened audience responses. The latest instalment in the franchise was produced in 3D and the franchise is now reportedly moving into VR.

Following The Blair Witch Project phenomenon, horror monsters now commonly sneak physically into our world for experiential, viral marketing. For Devil’s Due (2014), Thinkmodo created a video featuring an animatronic devil baby in a remote controlled pram. Thinkmodo’s devil baby has black eyes, protruding veins and green vomit dribbling down its chin. In the video, the pram appears to move on its own, sometimes sneaking up on people. The baby suddenly sits up and starts screeching, projectile vomiting and at one point raises a middle finger to a police car. The unwitting responses from the people in the street range from screaming in fright, delighted surprise to plain confusion. All of Thinkmodo‘s advertisements, which have included campaigns for Rings (2017), Carrie (2013) and television series The Walking Dead, have been “watched more than a million times – many of them more than 10 million”^[26].

The Blair Witch Project demonstrated the untapped potential of the Internet as a new platform through which monsters could arrive in our world. Today, horror viral marketing continues to find its victims in the real world and through different kinds of technology. The film The Last Exorcism (2010), frightened people on Chatroulette, a website that randomly links webcams – controversially known for men broadcasting their masturbation. For The Last Exorcism promotion, instead of a live webcam, a prerecorded video was used. The video features an attractive woman who begins to undo her top…she looks up, her eyes roll back and cracks appear across her face before she lurches towards the camera, roaring. The URL of the film’s website then appears in her place. The video circulated Chatroulette “for up to 2 hours a day”^[27]. A recording of viewers responding to the clip – most often showing male arousal turning into shock, disbelief or disgust – went viral. On YouTube, the video has had over nine million views. With a budget of $1.8 million, the film grossed over $41 million in the US and $67,738,090 globally^[28].

The tremendous success of experiential marketing demonstrates the demand for active participation in horror media to interact with its creatures and mythology. The Blair Witch Project appealed to audiences who wished to become enmeshed in the film’s supernatural universe (some people believed that the footage was real) as well as participants who sought to piece together the puzzles of evidence. It is unlikely that a film today could create widespread belief in a fictional world or monster due to audience familiarity and the proliferation of the Internet. VR, however, allows participants to interact with the text more intimately than ever before. A further evolution of experiential marketing seems possible with participants able to physically interact with the film’s universe and its inhabitants; however, it is too soon to gauge how marketing content creators will respond to the opportunity and challenges of this new platform, and if direct marketing into these worlds will match or exceed previous outcomes.

Contemporary VR Horror Experiences

There is now more demand for immersive, interactive experiences than ever before. This is evidenced by the rapidly increasing popularity of escape rooms, for example – a form of immersive, participatory entertainment in which typically a group of people are locked in a room and have to solve puzzles within a time limit to successfully “escape”. The experiences are escapist because they contain an interactive narrative and tend to be set in fictional locations. According to Nate Martin, co-founder of Puzzle Break, escape rooms jumped from five installations in 2013 to 1500 in 2017^[29]. Escape rooms and the marketing of The Blair Witch Project could be considered parallel experiences in that participants are not primarily interested in watching a narrative unfold: it is about participation; being a part of and exploring the diegesis. There is no story without the interaction of the participants; they are characters and the narrative is influenced by their actions.

Immersive theatre and haunted house simulations are older forms of entertainment that have also recently grown in popularity, intensity and sophistication. An example is Darren Lyn Bousman’s immersive theatre production The Tension Experience, which offers an individualised horror experience. The plot and universe of The Tension Experience are so extensive that the theatre was promoted using an alternate reality game (ARG) . This took the form of a transmedia story that takes place online and in the real world whereby participants can interact with and can alter the narrative through role-playing and puzzle solving. During the ARG, “participants solved riddles on the Tension website, met characters during sinister, in-person ‘consultations,’ and answered hundreds of incredibly invasive questions as part of the experience”^[30]. The ARG players came to know the story’s actors and their characters and through online forums, the community of players expanded the storyline. Some of their unique experiences included one player meeting a character in real life and witnessing that character’s throat being slit “just inches from her face”^[31]. Another character was choked to death on camera in a forum^[32]. The website states that the theatre experience blurs “the lines between reality and fiction” before, and during the theatre event using “actors, emails, phone calls, live video streams, in person events and just about every other avenue to get inside your head”. Each participant was required to fill out a questionnaire to personalise their experience. The simulation took place in “a labyrinthine warehouse” and one participant reported that their unique experience involved being stripped; made to call his wife “and tell her lies”; “post a fake Facebook status update”; “pretend a desk was [his] father’s coffin and tell him what [he] really thought of him”; touch himself sexually for thirty seconds; eat “human flesh”; be blindfolded and hogtied and be “in a vertical coffin of static-filled TV screens pressed against the body of” another participant^[33]. The cast worked from a “400 page script” and responses and plot points were triggered by the participant’s actions – some of which never eventuated^[34].

Bousman has theorised that the appeal of these experiences stems from “concern over our cultural obsession with mobile devices and social media interaction”^[35]. He claims that there are a growing number of people who “want to step away from the ever present-threat of online connectivity” to develop “physical connections, tangible connections with people” and “either consciously or subconsciously…reconnect with something visceral again”^[36]. While it may seem ironic, considering VR’s nature of shutting out the “real” world to a greater extent than ever before, these are exactly the experiences VR has to offer with the objective of complete immersion. Erik Davis has explained that VR’s ultimate goal is “absolute simulation: a medium so powerful that it transcends mediation, building worlds that can stand on their own two feet”^[37]. VR removes the sense of disconnection induced by mediation by making the participant an active member of the virtual universe; creating a physical, visceral experience.

Currently, VR lacks improvisation of storyline and character responses, the involvement of senses such as touch and smell, and the communal experience in the home environment. There are a growing number of VR experiences, however, that fuse VR technology with a physical environment. For example, Zero Latency started as a free-roaming zombie shooter VR simulation in a North Melbourne warehouse. In the initial experience, participants wore a VR headset connected to “a custom-made backpack” holding a PC hooked up to “a pair of headphones with an integrated mic for voice communications”^[38]. They also wielded a 2.5kg gun that was reportedly integral to the immersive experience in the way that it physically connected players to the virtual world^[39]. Journalist Campbell Simpson has described that “the sense of presence” almost eliminates “the sense that you’re wearing a computer on your back and running around in a warehouse”, and the fact that “there’s the faintest hint of the real world rushing back in when you take off the Oculus Rift after wearing it for almost an hour”^[40]. Today, Zero Latency‘s reach and technology continue to steadily improve and it now has “free-roaming virtual reality spaces in Tokyo, Madrid and Orlando” as well as a planned new Melbourne location^[41]. It also offers new experiences, such as “a sci-fi corridor shooter”, a 12 minute experience to survive “against a horde of zombies”, and a “physics puzzle”’ in which players “explore a floating stone maze”^[42].

These experiences, like current immersive horror simulations, are more expensive than the average VR download and require the participants to be able to travel to a particular location at a selected time. With VR’s constantly updating technology, it seems likely that in the near future we will be able to enjoy similar communal experiences by traversing the physical spaces of our own homes and backyards: VR can “be networked so that more than one person can enter the world at the same time and interact with each other in the same environment”^[43] using microphones and tactile feedback devices, such as the guns in Zero Latency. Furthermore, unlike previous experiential horror, the participant is not limited to whatever experiences happen to be hosted in their local area. With VR’s online connectivity there is the potential of boundless universes for its users to download and enter.

The Risks of Teleporting Into Horrific Universes

“Virtual reality is not a technology; it is a destination”.^[44]

A common concern about the rise of VR is that some people will choose to reside in virtual worlds over reality – a phenomenon that can already be seen in rare cases of people who neglect their health and/or their family for their video game addiction, occasionally resulting in death. For example, in 2015, two men were found dead on separate occasions in Internet Cafes in Taiwan^[45]. It was reported that when police and paramedics arrived at the scene of the second man’s death, who died of a cardiac arrest while gaming, other gamers in the cafe “continued as if nothing happened”^[46]. In 2010, there was a case in South Korea of a three-month-old baby who died from malnutrition due to being neglected by her parents who were addicted to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO) Prius; a game that involved raising virtual children^[47]. Similar cases are less likely in VR horror because it is unlikely that participants would choose to spend their life enveloped in a virtual nightmare. Reports of serious video-game addictions commonly involve MMOs such as Second Life where players are able to create elaborate alternative lives for themselves with virtual homes, assets, achievements and online friends and partners. Horror games, however, tend to be a battle for survival with the game concluding once the gamer has overcome the set objectives.

VR horror does, however, come with its own risks. When watching a traditional horror film, the experience is mitigated. Viewers are passive and their source of terror is typically through identification with the characters on screen. What then happens when the horror is inflicted directly upon its audience, when the onlooker becomes a character? These concerns can be encapsulated in the myth of the panicking audience. Beginning in 1896 with the Lumière brother’s film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, there arose the reported phenomenon of audiences flinching or running away from the projected image of an approaching train because the image was so realistic that they feared they were about to be run over. It is likely, however, that most of these stories were fabricated to promote the realism of the films as well as to dare audiences to see it for themselves. It is possible that with VR’s depth of immersion, participants may genuinely feel at risk. In fact, while horror films are known to make the typical audience member jump, there are already countless videos online featuring people shrieking and quivering while trying out VR horror games and experiences for the first time.

For participants unprepared for a horror experience, there is always the potential for trauma. These concerns can be seen explored in a recent episode of Black Mirror^[48], a contemporary science-fiction anthology series similar to The Twilight Zone^[49] except that it is more firmly tethered to our reality. It is focused on the potential of new technologies in not-so-distant futures and often the storylines are frightening for seeming not-so farfetched; demonstrating our modern paranoia of the unknown repercussions of living in a tech-based society. News articles that followed the latest season’s premiere appeared to confirm some of the shows predictions. For example, China’s contemplation of a social credit score system^[50], that is similar to the plot of episode Nosedive, in which a social media ratings system determines one’s privileges in society. Another recent news story highlighted Japan’s invention of artificial bee drones^[51], reminiscent of the plot of the episode Hated in the Nation. While focused more on augmented reality than virtual reality, the episode Playtest is an analogy of current fears of technological horror experiences becoming too extreme.

In Playtest, American backpacker Cooper is a thrill-seeker. He boasts to Sonja, a girl he meets on a dating app, about how he ran with the bulls in Spain as he shows off a scar on his arm like a souvenir or mark of achievement. In short, he appears to be the perfect candidate for VR horror. He responds to a job advertisement to test new video game software at the company SaitoGemu, where he is invited to beta test “the most personal survivor horror game in history…that works out how to scare you by using your own mind…”. Participants must have a small device inserted into the back of their neck which provides a data connection between the participant’s brain and the game platform. The game is closer to a haunted house experience than a video game but with augmented reality manifestations rather than actors and stagecraft. During the experience, the scares intensify. To begin, he is driven to a 19th-Century Gothic mansion. A large spider runs across the floor before suddenly jumping at him. He encounters a representation of Josh Peters, “the high-school dick”, whose face is later composited onto a giant, grotesque spider. Later, Sonja arrives, first as his friend but then she begins to attack him with a knife, piercing his chest from behind, as the flesh on her face is digitally peeled away to reveal bone and muscle. He manages to impale her skull onto the knife protruding from his chest. At this point Cooper calls out to be released from the game, screaming insistently that he could physically feel being stabbed. He is told this is impossible because the game is purely audiovisual. The plot culminates with him losing touch with any sense of reality and he spirals physically and mentally into uncontrollable terror – ultimately losing his sanity as he fears the game has overridden his mind and memories.

Entertainment technology fusing with the body may not seem to be a concern for the immediate future; however, elements of Playtest‘s horror game can be seen today. The use of psychological analysis of players to customise their experience, as seen in both Playtest and The Tension Experience, has been experimented with in survival horror video games, such as in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Under the guise of assessing the mental health of the game’s protagonist, character Dr Kaufmann provides the player with “a questionnaire inspired by the ‘Big 5’ personality test”^[52]. The game also collects data on “how players interacted with the game world: how long they spent exploring each area before moving on; whether they strayed from clearly marked paths” et cetera^[53]. Using this data, the game adapts to play upon each player’s own fears and behaviours. There has also been development work by AI researchers such as Noor Shaker, on creating video games that can monitor and adjust to players’ emotions. Shaker said she believes “data-driven automatic content personalisation is possible” and that “recent research has shown that emotions such as frustration, engagement and surprise can be detected and modelled by machine learning methods”^[54]. Therefore, it is reasonable to postulate that in the future, there will be VR experiences that curate personalised nightmares based on each participant’s phobias, emotions and behaviours.

As mentioned previously, our personal data could also be used to customise our VR experiences, complete with digital versions of our social media friends. A personalised horror universe could have frightening consequences. While horror cinema, games and other experiences allow us to explore our fears through a safe, controlled performance far removed from our reality, VR could use our data to envelop us in a dreadful version of our daily reality. Imagine representations of your friends, family or pets in danger, pain or perhaps like Playtest, changed or morphed into some uncanny other. Even journeying as allies with representations of people we know seems a potentially disturbing concept. Deceased family members could re-appear, such as in phantasmagoria shows, potentially to the shock of the participant. With Google Maps Street View technology, there could be nightmarish recreations of your own neighbourhood. An example of an early version of a horror experience mining our data is the website, Take This Lollipop. After given permission to access your Facebook account, a video plays of a hillbilly-type character sitting at a computer in a dark room with creepy music. He looks through your Facebook profile – your “friends”, photos and statuses – while sweating, staring intensely at the screen and at one point running his fingers across one of your photos before gazing sinisterly into the camera. He then searches for the suburb of your address before he is shown driving in a car with flashes of maniacal rage. The experience overall is generally very creepy, although it can also be unintentionally humorous depending on what photos are randomly chosen and because it relies on your Facebook information, tends to be accurate. It is yet to be seen how unsettling these personalised universes will prove to be.

Of course, not all horror experiences are terrifying, nor do they need to be to succeed. VR does not guarantee scares. As ever, it depends on the story and its execution. Horror history suggests VR will offer content from fairytale lands to “torture porn”. Consumers will still be able to choose their own experiences. One would expect that some VR experiences will test the tolerance of even the most desensitised thrill-seekers, which could be the intent of some. Concern over the dangers of horror is perpetual but I would argue has proven to be largely unfounded or overblown. Jeffrey Goldstein supports the theory that safe and enjoyable horror begins with consent:

“Both the context of violent images themselves and the circumstances in which they are experienced play a crucial role in their appeal. People go to horror films in order to experience in safety emotions that are usually associated with danger. In order to experience anything like pleasure from exposure to violent or threatening images, the audience must feel relatively safe and secure in their surroundings”.^[55]

In Playtest, Cooper meets with SaitoGemu creator, Shou Saito, who discusses the appeal of horror gaming: “I have always liked to make the player jump. Frightened, you get a scare, you jump. Afterwards, you feel good, you glow…mostly because you are still alive. You have faced your greatest fears in a safe environment. It is a release of fear. It liberates you”.

Conclusion

VR is a revolutionary entertainment technology which promises particular potential for the horror genre ahead of most others because it can be used to enhance, reinvent and reimagine powerful experiential horror techniques within new universes. It is a new era of embodied, participatory experiences; accessible by portable, affordable home entertainment systems. VR horror has the potential for causing unpleasant or even traumatic experiences because of its heightened sensory impact. This is a risk present for all horror experiences, however, and participants knowingly push their own limits. It allows participants to step beyond the barrier of the two-dimensional screen to be part of the text’s universe and narrative as a character themselves – creating more immersive, personalised, participatory and physical at-home experiences than ever before. The thrill and adrenaline of horror can be an escapism from the normality, the mundanity of our everyday bodily experiences. Through horror we are able to explore our raw, base emotions. In safety, we confront and overcome threats to our bodies, sanity, values and/or morality. VR has the capacity to reinvent horror media to unprecedented immersiveness, interactivity and embodiment. By blurring the distinctions between horror cinema, games and simulations, VR allows participants the pleasure of heightened sensory and participatory experiences in new and exciting universes. Now, there really is something behind you.

Notes 

1. Due to this research being focused on the horror genre and the limitations of this article, other VR predecessors have not been mentioned, including but not limited to: Dioramas, Panoramas, Stereoscopes, virtual travel experiences showcased at World Expos (e.g. Hale’s Tours), Sensorama, Cinerama, The Aspen Movie Map and The Sword of Damocles. Research into these and other technological experiences is advised for a wider understanding of the history of VR.

^[1]   Melanie Chan, Virtual Reality Representations in Contemporary Media (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 2.

^[2]   Frank Biocca, Taeyong Kim and Mark R. Levy, “The Vision of Virtual Reality,” in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed. Frank Biocca. (Florence: Taylor and Francis), 6.

^[3]      Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly (1991): 4.

^[4]      Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” 2.

^[5]     Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of

Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Stauven. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 382.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s],” 384.

^[8] Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy, “Communication Applications of Virtual Reality,” in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed. Frank Biocca. (Florence: Taylor and Francis), 135.

^[9]      Keith Stuart, “Has a Black Mirror episode predicted the future of video games?”, The Guardian, 27 October, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/26/black-mirror-episode-playtest-predicted-future-video-games-augmented-reality.

^[10]     Rachel Weber, “How VR Horror Games Mess With Your Head,” Glixel, November 1, 2016, http://www.glixel.com/news/how-vr-horror-games-mess-with-your-head-w448049.

^[11] Steffen Hantke, American Horror Film The Genre At The Turn Of The Millennium (USA: The University of

Mississippi 2010), [10].

^[12]     Ibid.

^[13] Laurent Mannoni, “The phantasmagoria,” Film History (1996): 392.

^[14]  Mannoni, “The phantasmagoria,” 405-406.

^[15]  Mannoni, “The phantasmagoria,” 393.

^[16]  Mannoni, “The phantasmagoria,” 406.

^[17]  Ibid.

^[18]  Mannoni, “The phantasmagoria,” 395.

^[19] Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Old Tropes in New Dimensions: Stereoscopy and Franchise Spectatorship,” Film Criticism (2013): 12.

^[20]  Benson-Allott, “Old Tropes in New Dimensions,” 17.

^[21]  Martin Harris, “The Witchcraft of media manipulation: Pamela and The Blair Witch Project,” Journal of Popular Culture (2001): 77.

^[22]  Harris, “The Witchcraft of media manipulation,” 79.

^[23]  Harris, “The Witchcraft of media manipulation,” 78.

^[24]  Peter Turner, The Blair Witch Project (Great Britain: Auteur 2014), 81.

^[25]  Turner, Blair Witch, 84.

^[26]  Claire Suddath, “Thinkmodo Perfects the Viral-Video Ad Strategy – With Pranks,” Bloomberg, January 4, 2014.

^[27]  Dorothy Pomerantz, “The Secret Behind The Viral Video For ‘The Last Exorcism’,” Forbes, August 25, 2010.

^[28]  “The Last Exorcism (2010),” Box Office Mojo, accessed 20 March, 2017, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lastexorcism.htm.

^[29]  Bryan Bishop, “How Escape Rooms and Live Theater Are Paving The For VR,” The Verge, February 7, 2017, http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/7/14534230/virtual-reality-future-of-storytelling-immersive-theater-sundance.

^[30]  Bryan Bishop, “Cults, Chaos and Community: How The Tension Experience Rewrote The Rules of Storytelling,” The Verge, November 22, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/22/13716340/the-tension-experience-lust-darren-lynn-bousman-clint-sears-interview.

^[31]  Ibid.

^[32]  Ibid.

^[33]  Tim Chester, “The Tension Experience: A live theater show that seriously messes with your head,” Mashable, September 22, 2016. http://mashable.com/2016/09/21/tension-experience-review/#lLAQL3FtlqqF

^[34]  Ibid.

^[35]  Bryan Bishop, “The Future of Fear: The scariest movie this Halloween is a play called Delusion,” The Verge, October 15, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/15/13292402/delusion-his-crimson-queen-interactive-play-jon-braver-interview

^[36]  Ibid.

^[37]  Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), 247.

^[38]  Campbell Simpson, “This Is Zero Latency, The Future of Immersive Gaming,” Kotaku, August 4, 2015, https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/08/this-is-zero-latency-the-future-of-immersive-gaming/.

^[39]  Ibid.

^[40]  Ibid.

^[41]  Campbell Simpson, “Zero Latency 2.0: New Levels In Virtual Reality,” Kotaku, March 6, 2017, https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/zero-latency-2-0-new-levels-in-virtual-reality/.

^[42]  Ibid.

^[43]  Diana Gagnon Hawkins, “Virtual Reality and Passive Simulators: The Future of Fun,” in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed. Frank Biocca (Florence: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 175.

^[44]  Biocca, Kim and R. Levy, “The Vision of Virtual Reality,” 4.

^[45] Katie Hunt and Naomi Ng, “Man dies in Taiwan after 3-day online gaming binge”, CNN, January 19, 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/19/world/taiwan-gamer-death/.

^[46] Ibid.

^[47] Yannick LeJacq, “The Story Of A Couple Who Played Video Games While Their Child Died”, Kotaku, July 30, 2014, https://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/07/the-story-of-a-couple-who-played-video-games-while-their-child-died/.

^[48] Black Mirror. Created by Charlie Brooker. Channel 4 and Netflix. Original air date 4 December, 2011.

^[49] The Twilight Zone. Created by Rod Serling. CBS and UPN. Original air date October 2, 1959.

^[50]  Clinton Nguyen, “China might create a Black Mirror-like score for each citizen based on how trustworthy they are,” Business Insider Australia, October 27, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/china-social-credit-score-like-black-mirror-2016-10?r=US&IR=T.

^[51]  Dom Galeon, “Japan Has Created Black Mirror-Inspired Bee Drones,” Futurism, February 9, 2017, https://futurism.com/japan-has-created-black-mirror-inspired-bee-drones/.

^[52]  Stuart, “Has a Black Mirror episode predicted the future of video games?”

^[53]  Ibid.

^[54]  Ibid.

^[55] Jeffrey Goldstein, “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment,” Media Psychology (1999): 278.

Note on Contributor

Merinda Staubli made her first horror films while studying a Bachelor of Film and Television at Swinburne University (2014). Her graduate film Night Terrors has screened and been a finalist in national and international film festivals (Monster Fest, A Night of Horror International Film Festival, Macabre Faire Film Festival, Ax Wound Film Festival, Peninsula Short Film Fest). She further pursued her academic interests by completing an Honours degree at The University of Melbourne (2015). Her Honours thesis was called ‘Experiential Horror: The Reach of Horror Beyond the Cinema Screen’. She is currently in post-production with a short body horror film which will hopefully soon start its run on the festival circuit.

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Weber, Rachel. “How VR Horror Games Mess With Your Head.” Glixel, November 1, 2016. Accessed April 24, 2017. http://www.glixel.com/news/how-vr-horror-games-mess-with-your-head-w448049.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly (1991): 2-13.

Filmography  

Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017)

Amityville: The Awakening (Franck Khalfoun, 2017)

Annabelle: Creation (David Sandberg, 2017)

Black Mirror, “Playtest” (Dan Trachtenberg, 21 October 2016)

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

Children of the Corn: Runaway (John Gulager, 2017)

Cult of Chucky (Don Mancini, 2017)

Devil’s Due (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2014)

Flatliners (Niels Arden Oplev, 2017)

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

Halloween: The Evil Night Died (Kohl V. Bladen and Jeffrey J. Moore, 2017)

Hellraiser: Judgement (Gary J. Tunnicliffe, 2017)

Jeepers Creepers 3: Cathedral (Victor Salva, 2017)

Insidious: Chapter 4 (Adam Robitel, 2017)

It (Andres Muschiette, 2017)

L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière, 1895)

The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman, 2017)

Saw: Legacy (Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig, 2017)

Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2017)

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2016)

Rings (F. Javier Gutiérrez, 2017)

The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm, 2010)

Underworld: Blood Wars (Anna Foerster, 2017)

World War Z 2 (David Fincher, 2017)

Wrong Turn 7 (Director currently unknown, 2017)

Israel Luna’s 2010 horror film Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives marks a distinct change in the representation of transgender people in both horror film and mainstream media. When TIME’s Bureau Chief and journalist Katy Steinmetz declared the year 2014 to be a “Transgender Tipping Point,” she spoke to the seemingly sudden uptick in the representation of transgender characters in TV shows which characterised a larger social atmosphere that was beginning to take seriously the social issues facing transgender people in the US.[1] Since Steinmetz’s Time article, the transgender tipping point has tipped further with Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out and the Gavin Grimm case in US headlines. But what the transgender tipping point fails to recognise is that transgender people have consistently been staple characters in the predominantly American horror genre of the Slasher film.[2] The Slasher film, according to horror scholar Carol J. Clover, is “the immensely generative story of a psychokiller who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.”[3] Many of the killers in these Slasher films, such as Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Buffalo Bill from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991), are gender-ambiguous, effectively conflating monstrosity and transgender identity.[4] The “transgender monster”[5] in these films has become so influential to horror that decades later Dafydd Goff, the culture subeditor of the Guardian UK, would remark that the 2012 film House at The End of the Street relied on “stock shocks and convoluted plot twists”[6] of the standard gender reveal which these earlier Slashers popularized. Indeed, transgender scholars, such as Joelle Ruby Ryan and Julia Serano, have criticised ‘the gender-ambiguous killer’ for being so influential as it has propped up and perpetuated the myth in Western culture of the transgender woman as predator, rather than a victim who is often targeted.[7]

What makes Luna’s film, Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives, different from recent horror films like House At The End of the Street is that he subverts the normative script provided to transgender characters by effectively fusing the victim and killer roles on-screen. Instead of utilizing the transgender killer as a plot device to reveal criminality, his transgender characters are the main characters who prevail at the end of the narrative. Furthermore, he uses the horror subgenre of the rape-revenge exploitation film (where victims seek revenge on their abusers) in order to demonstrate the real-world issues that transgender women face. By the end of his film, Luna has managed to recast the role of the “Final Girl” in horror film as that of a transgender woman, thereby making transgender women the main focus of a genre where they have regularly been cast as a villain. In this article, I use Patricia White’s concept of ‘retrospectatorship’ in order to effectively demonstrate how Luna infuses his horror film with memory and affect, thus creating a new perspective on older tropes that no longer resonate with the current culture on transgender storytelling. I examine the film’s relationship to the exploitation genre through its evocation of the hate speech ‘tranny’ and the violence that goes with hate speech through the film’s “missing reel”[8]; I then follow that analysis with a history of the transgender monster archetype in the Slasher film, and document how, through the inversion of the binaries of male/female, killer/victim, and cis/trans in the rape-revenge subgenre of the Slasher, Luna creates Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives as an homage to past horror film while also providing new roles for transgender women on-screen.

‘Tranny’ and The Missing Reel

The plot of Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives is simple. The film opens with the five main characters, all of whom are transgender women, talking to each other at a club they work at as drag performers. Rachel Slurr (William Bellini) and Emma Grashun (Erica Andrews) flirt with two men, Nacho (Kenny Ochoa) and Chuey (Geraldo Davila). When they learn of a third man, Rachel and Emma invite Bubbles Cliqot (Krystal Summers) along as his date. Her date ends up being a man named Boner (Tom Zembrod), whom she had met before; their previous date ended in her rape when he realised she was a transgender woman. The three men soon attack Rachel, Emma and Bubbles until Pinky La’Trimm (Kelexis Davenport) and Tipper Sommore (Jenna Skyy) come to help. The trans women are overpowered and the screen cuts to black. Bubbles wakes up in the hospital with Pinky and Rachel, only to realise that Tipper and Emma have been killed. After Bubbles recovers, their friend Fergus trains the three of them in martial arts and plot revenge. The rest of the film documents their successful attacks on each of the men, leaving Boner for last. Luna divides his film into five reels which act as five chapters, mimicking the three-act structure of most rape-revenge exploitation films from the 1970s.[9]

As a genre, exploitation film is meant to exploit the viewer for quick profit, but also the actors and identities being portrayed on the screen.[10] Luna is highly cognisant of the identity issues informing this particular genre, as he is on record for wanting to make Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives as a response to the “Fight hate with love” and “Love the bashers” campaigns he’d seen around LGBTQ hate-motivated violence.[11] He chose to focus his story on transgender women particularly because he realised that while they were often the victims of violence, their stories were not told on the news.[12] Effectively, Luna wanted to depict the precarious nature of transgender identity on the screen, exploit that instability through an act of dreaded and anticipated violence, and then use the following revenge as catharsis. His use of the word ‘tranny’ in the title demonstrates this affective framework most succinctly.

Tranny is a slur in the transgender community since it is often used in a derogatory fashion. Similar to the term ‘she-male,’ tranny has often been used in pornography to fetishise the trans (especially pre-operative) body, which works at dehumanising it.[13] Because of this, the word itself has been seen as emblematic of a violent act to the point where to say it is violence, especially for those outside the community.[14] The word ‘tranny’ in Luna’s title is one of the major reasons why Luna’s film was protested on release.[15] As a cisgender man (someone who identifies with the gender he was declared at birth)[i], he was seen as someone who could not use the word and was using it too callously since it was removed from its violent history. However, I posit that Luna’s use of ‘tranny’ was a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the term’s violent history because extreme violence is precisely the point of the exploitation film.

The film’s entire plot is constructed around two main acts of transphobic violence: Bubbles’ previous rape and the attack on the five transgender women. Bubbles’ rape happens before the beginning of the movie while the majority of the attack on the five women happens on a “missing reel” of film that the audience does not see.[16] By sparing the audience from witnessing the sexualised violence inflicted on Bubbles as well as the death of two transgender women, but keeping the word ‘tranny’ intact and often used by the attackers, Luna manages to make the word the violent act. Those who use the word “tranny” are those who facilitate acts of violence. This association does not stop for the transgender women, either. By having the women take the slur back as their own term, becoming the ‘ticked-off trannies with knives’ the violence that makes them the victim is evident—but so is their power to fight back. The word tranny becomes a weapon against the transgender women, only to be reclaimed by them in the second half of the film, while remaining equally as powerful. Whether the transgender women use it—or the attackers—the word itself becomes a way to demonstrate the everyday violent oppression of transphobia in action. Luna does all of this so well that he even dubs his particular rape-revenge grindhouse film a type of “transploitation.”[17] Through this term, he draws reference to the history of exploitation cinema and how the transgender body has been exploited on-screen.

At the beginning of each chapter in Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives, the screen flashes to black and the new chapter is announced, for example: “Chapter Three: Boo!”. At the height of the fight scene between Bubbles and Boner, the screen fades to black and leaves the audience with the unsettling image of Boner holding a baseball bat about to strike Bubbles’ head. Instead of announcing a new chapter, however, the message display reads: “The following film may contain one or more missing REELS. Sorry for the inconvenience.—Theatre Management”[18] This missing reel disrupts the viewing experience, which makes the audience aware they are in a physical place (“theatre”) and that they occupy a passive position to this violence. By drawing attention to the film’s inadequacies, Luna roots his film in the physical place where exploitation films were shown and enables the affective experiences that exploitation films demand.

During the 1970s, theatres known as ‘grindhouses’ emerged in the US as a way for the theatres to make quick and easy money with a “continuous grind [of] programming” and spectators.[19] Though scholar Glenn Ward acknowledges that the genre of “‘grindhouse cinema’ and ‘grindhouse film'” never really existed as a solidified genre, the popular use of the term and the nostalgia associated with the filmmaking aesthetics led to a commonly held association of what the term meant.[20] Grindhouse cinema was “sleaze” “retro” and “trash” that was shown in a particular place during a particular time period—in the “cinemas of New York 42nd street [that] specialized in exploitation films” during the 1970s.[21] The term ‘grindhouse’ is something that re-emerged in modern day retellings of this particular era; it is a memory as well as an associated style that never solidified as such during its peak. I bring up this term’s complicated cultural history to demonstrate how, when people like director Quentin Tarantino refer to grindhouse, they are evoking less of a lived reality and more of a shared fantasy of the exploitation genre. It is a low-fi production film with an allure of cultural “trash”—but its memory also evokes a physical place where people used to watch movies.

It is easy to see Tarantino’s influence on Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives. Along with the evocation of the grindhouse theatre through the misplaced reel, and Luna’s documented fascination with Tarantino’s Grindhouse (2008)[22], the training scene after the attack visually alludes to Tarantino’s film Kill Bill (2003) through a similar relationship between the master who imparts wisdom onto the women who have been abused. Luna’s cultural citation links his film to a genre that is both rooted in the physical and affective realms, which codes his filmmaking process with a layer of nostalgia. Because he draws from Tarantino’s work as a source text (through the films of Kill Bill (2003), Grindhouse (2008), and Jackie Brown (1997)[ii]), and because most of those films were nostalgic looks back on exploitation cinema to begin with, Luna’s act of new filmmaking bears resemblance to Patricia White’s concept of “retrospectatorship.”[23]

White defines retrospectatorship as a viewing experience which “is transformed by unconscious and conscious past viewing experience” meaning that “[c]ultural texts ‘outside’ the subject participate in th[e] structuring [of the film], and each new textual encounter is shaped by what’s already ‘inside’ the viewer”.[24] For White, this concept was useful to define lesbian cinema during the Hays production era which prohibited lesbian desire on-screen, but still utilised certain “cinematic codes”[25] to signal lesbian plotlines that viewers could interpret, which radically transformed their spectatorship practices. Similarly, scholar Rachel Carroll has characterised White’s concept as a “subjective fantasy [that] revises memory traces” of a previous experience.[26] In Luna’s case, he attempts to participate in a film genre that arguably never existed, thereby creating an almost dream-like pastiche, a grab-bag of associations that have something to do with the “sleaze”[27] of exploitation cinema, making his former spectatorship of the genre a retrospectatorship when he makes his own film. Luna must approach filmmaking as a spectator affected by memory and fantasy, blurring the genre of the grindhouse into something both real and imagined. Retrospectatorship, according to Carroll, “offers a valuable framework within which to conceptualize repetition, as a mode of cultural experience, and its relation to memory and affect”[28] and in this way, it is fundamental to the adaptation—or perpetuation—of a genre. As Ward argues, grindhouse may have never existed, but that does not matter, since the feelings it evokes are still real, and it is those feelings and cinematic codes which audiences interpret. In Luna’s case, he used the memory of the grindhouse/exploitation cinema to radically alter transgender representation.

‘Transploitation’ and Transgender Monsters

The 1970s marked a large period of cinematic visibility for transgender people, typified by what I would deem the quintessential ‘transploitation’ film, Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die a Woman (1977). Let Me Die a Woman contains many different scenes/techniques common in exploitation film, making it a seemingly endless array of subgenres. The endless gore through surgery shots align it with horror gore; it purports to be a mondo film[iii] that informs its audience about a topic; there are several soft-core sex scenes with a transgender character and the film was penned by Wishman, a prolific writer of sexploitation films. Let Me Die a Woman, along with other trans films from this era like John Dexter’s I Want What I Want (1972), Irving Rapper’s The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), and Michael Sarne’s Myra Brekinridge (1970), solidified the filmmaking techniques surrounding the transgender body on-screen. Graphic images or details of surgery; a mise-en-scène that displays the transgender person’s pre- or post-op genitals; excessive montages and/or shots of cross-dressing, especially images of nylon stockings; and close-up shots framing the transgender person’s emotional confession are a few of the filmic tropes that solidified as “cinematic codes”[29] during this era.

Trans theorist Julia Serano, along with Joelle Ruby Ryan and Casey Plett, have also noticed these distinct discursive practices when it comes to current transgender representation. Trans people are either deceptive or pathetic,[30] “mere fantasies”[31] or they are stereotypes used to move the story forward.[32] A repeated trope in horror films involving transgender people is that of the transgender killer, psychopath, or monster—something of which Joelle Ruby Ryan studies in depth. She defines the “transgender monster” as:

“A recurring stereotype in the transgender media canon, most commonly seen in slasher films but occasionally in dramas, suspense and action films as well. While previously the demarcation between animal and human was cast as monstrous, historical developments and the tastes of audiences changed this. Audiences began to fear not some mythical animal-human hybrid creature that does not exist in reality, but the very real people who live right next door.”[33]

As K.E. Sullivan documents, the “very real people who live right next door”[34] facet of this monster archetype stems from the real-life arrest and interrogation of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer.[35] Author Robert Bloch would use Gein’s possible cross-dressing and mother obsession for his depiction of Norman Bates in Psycho while Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), would come to depict the character of Leatherface as Gein’s obsession with making household items out of skin.[36] The most famous incarnation of Gein is notably in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), where he was the model for Buffalo Bill. In The Silence of the Lambs, Jame Gumb (birth name of Buffalo Bill) is referred to as a transsexual, though Gumb is rejected from surgery by John Hopkins University and then by Hannibal Lecter;[37] Gumb’s subsequent need to make a “woman suit”[38] without the help of doctors demonstrates how much the doctor’s narrative of gender affirmation surgery intertwines with the transgender person’s identity. Scholar Jay Prosser notes that transgender patients must “tell a coherent story of transsexual experience” and only after the doctor accepts the story will the surgery be performed.[39] This narrative construction always puts the transgender person on display, either physically through their body or through their life story and proper articulation of their gender identity.[40] Buffalo Bill, like the trans women in Let Me Die a Woman, are exploited on-screen through a “big reveal”[41] shot of their genitals, which, in the case of Buffalo Bill, also links transgender identity to monstrosity.[42] Since the creation of Buffalo Bill, the character has come to represent the quintessential trans monster,[43] an embodiment of transmisogyny,[44] “gender dysphoria gone horribly awry”[45] and an enactment of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance as nothing but surface artifact.[46] The character’s impact and cultural legacy still lingers today in both what it means to be a transgender person on-screen and what it means to reveal a transgender killer on-screen, as House at the End of the Street and Goff’s[47] review attests to. In the horror genre, the desire/revulsion of the transgender body is demonstrated through “stock shocks”[48] where the transgender body is exploited and their gender identity is seen as a “convoluted plot twist.”[49] No matter the era, the goal of the trans killer as symbol is to point out an aberration in hegemonic masculinity and then destroy it so the social order is re-established.[50] The transgender monster became a repeated staple in the 1980s and especially potent once it was paired with the “Final Girl.”

In Carol J. Clover’s discussion of the Final Girl in Men Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film (1992), she remarks that the “surprise [of the Slasher film] is often within gender,” and refers to the films Psycho and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) as examples of the gender-reveal occurring at the same time as the killer is revealed, effectively fusing these two identities together.[51] “In a striking number of cases,” she also writes, the gender surprise is “across it.”[52] Since the Final Girl character is often gender-ambiguous as well, the pairing of these two identities takes on another layer of the “surprise”; whereas the gender ambiguousness of the killer links them to monstrosity, the gender ambiguousness of the Final Girl seems to save her, since she is taken out of the sexual dynamics of the film through her tomboyish appearance and mannerisms.[53] “The gender-identity game” that these two figures face off against is actually an “integral element” of this genre.[54] The Slasher film becomes a play of binaries working together—male/female and victim/killer—until the Final Girl re-establishes order and becomes the hero through her annihilation of the deviant trans woman killer.[55]

This annihilation of the transgender monster has repercussions in real life. As Joelle Ruby Ryan notes, one of the main reasons why there is overkill in hate crimes involving transgender women is because of the revulsion/desire the (pre-operative) transgender body inspires.[56] Luna also echoes Ryan’s observation in his interview with Daniel Villarreal;[57] transgender women are in a precarious position when it comes to their representation on-screen and off because while they are often highly sexualised in a violent manner, they seem to remain utterly invisible from news coverage about their deaths.[58] When Luna turns to the exploitation genre to better represent transgender women, he does so with the history of transgender bodies being exploited and highly sexualized in mind; he performs yet another “retrospectatorship” on the genre.[59] In this instance, though, Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives becomes an exploitation film in aesthetics only; it is a pastiche of the genre, but not of transgender people. Unlike the transgender killers who have come before them, Bubbles, Pinky, and Rachel cannot—and do not—fall under the same trope of the aforementioned transgender monster or psychopath. Instead, Luna uses the rape-revenge subgenre of exploitation film to subvert the violence done to transgender bodies, and give voice back to transgender women who have been exploited.

Rape-Revenge Predators

Carol J. Clover views the woman at the centre of the rape-revenge storyline as an extension of the Final Girl trope since “the Jennifers[iv] of the rape-revenge films come closer than the Final Girls of slasher films to being ‘heroes,’ taking, as they do, the long remainder of the movie to calculate and then execute revenge on their assailants.”[60] As she documents in “Getting Even” her chapter devoted to the rape-revenge genre, the extended sequence of violence and trauma in these films allows for the typical male viewer to understand and then sympathise with the victim.[61] The rape-revenge genre “shocks not because it is alien but because it is too familiar, because we recognize that the emotions it engages are regularly engaged by the big screen but almost never bluntly acknowledged for what they are.”[62] Clover focuses on the point-of-view shots from Jennifer’s perspective in I Spit on Your Grave (1978) as they allow for the audience to take her side. Moreover, because the film offers no explanation and no redemption arc for the rapists, the audience is allowed “no outs” and no other social apparatus (such as the law) to help us with “intellectual displacement” of their violence; instead we must bear witness to the crime as it is.[63] Other rape-revenge films embody similar motifs, even those that do not have the woman surviving her rape (such as in The Last House on The Left (1972)), since the justice that is sought for the victim at the hands of parents or other loved ones still aligns the audience with the victim’s struggle.[64] The Final Girl is simultaneously both victim and killer—but her violence is coded as heroism, especially in the genre of rape-revenge. Even if her “Final” status may only be in memory in some rape-revenge genres, her existence is symbolic of something much greater: she is “the great equaliser of slasher films, the woman who, in outwitting the killer, forced male viewers to see themselves in her.”[65]

Because of her equaliser stance, she has been seen as a feminist icon—but not without some contention. In Andi Zeisler’s summary of rape-revenge, she pays homage to Carol J. Clover’s progressive assessment of the Final Girl, but quickly dismisses Clover since it was “men who made up a large share of its audience [and they] got plenty of pleasure out of seeing women terrorized, sexualized, and killed.”[66] Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Linda Williams, however, tend to side with Clover’s stance that the rape-revenge genre can be subversive and transgressive since it allows for the audience (especially women) to “bear witness to her own powerlessness in the face of rape, mutilation, and murder.”[67] I rehash these opposing sides, not to necessarily pick one over the other (though I tend to fall more on Clover’s perspective), but to display the ways in which the discussion on rape-revenge in film is split along gender lines, but only as it pertains to cisgender identity. This is a battle between male perpetrators/spectators and female victims/characters; transgender identity never enters into these debates, even though the Slasher film has plenty of gender ambiguous characters.

As the horror film genre has progressed, there have been some counter-readings to Clover’s concept of the Final Girl as not precisely a girl, but as a “conceptual figure”[68] free of binary gender, but I have yet to find any theoretical framework that takes the gender ambiguousness of the Final Girl and reinterprets her as a transgender man. The closest that Carol gets to perhaps positing a stand-in for a transgender man in a horror film is through her analysis of the possession film, where a prepubescent girl’s body becomes the perfect vessel for Satan, who effectively makes her “macho”[69] especially in scenes where she speaks with a “male voice.”[70] This absence of trans-masculinity is significant since there have been multiple readings of the gender ambiguousness of the Slasher killers as trans women. To me, what this absence points to is another hidden binary in the horror genre and the culture of analysis around these films; not only is identity drawn around binary concepts of male/female and killer/victim, but cisgender/transgender as well. More than that, this battleground seems to pit transgender women and cisgender women against one another, which mirrors the radical feminist debate in the 1970s.[71]

In 1979, second wave radical feminist Janice Raymond released a book entitled The Transsexual Empire: The Making of The She-Male (1979). The book documents Raymond’s stance on an issue that had been erupting in the radical feminist movement for some time: whether or not to include transgender women in women-only spaces. For Raymond, trans women should not be accepted in these spaces as they are not women; they are men appropriating an identity to make a mockery of women, or they are only in disguise so they could enter these safe spaces and harm women.[72] While not every single radical feminist sought to delegitimise the transgender movement, there has been a continuous dissent among some radical feminists (often referred to as TERFS; trans-exclusionary radical feminists) about this issue. As Julia Serano documents, these exclusionary practices still occur today and function around the same issues of viewing transgender women as imposters and/or predators.[73] The myth of the transgender woman as predator stems from these radical feminist disagreements of the 1970s; it’s what influenced the “deceptive”[74] trope in cinema and what administrators still think of when they attempt to prohibit or limit transgender bathroom use.[75] Transgender women are repeatedly cast into the role of the predator-rapist[76] because they are not seen as ‘real’ women and it is assumed that they disrupt safe spaces with the threat of their male body. In the Slasher film, when a gender-ambiguous killer (who is often read as a trans woman) enters an assumed safe space—like a camp, a house, or teenage girl’s bedroom—to attack young women, and is only defeated/survived by a Final Girl who is boyish but is decidedly not transgender in cultural readings, the horror film itself seems to act as an adaptation of radical feminist politics. The implicit reading of the binaries in this cis/trans battleground is that the killer is trans and the Final Girl is cis, meaning that trans women, yet again, must be annihilated. This annihilation validates what TERF feminists think trans women are capable of (that they are rapists/murders) and it also gives them what they want (trans women out of safe spaces). In the most extreme sense, the Final Girl can be held up as a radical feminist icon because she makes both of these goals possible.

What this means for the horror genre is that the Final Girl/cross-dressing killer as a binary pair has persisted in films like House At The End of the Street while the “Jennifers”[77] of the rape-revenge genre do not change since heroism itself is still associated with cisgender womanhood. Transgender women, in spite of being an active part of the feminist movement,[78] have not been seen in the rape-revenge genre because they have always been seen as the rapist in both film and in some radical feminist discourse.[79] Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives manages to take both of these notions—that the trans woman is only a killer and that the final emblematic idea of survival is cisgender—and subverts their meanings. Luna’s film discards the transgender killer trope by subjecting the lead characters to oppression-based violence and demonstrating that they, as trans women, are the ones who need protecting. But instead of having cisgender authority figures swoop in and resolve the issue (as other heteronormative films have done)[80] Luna has the remaining trans women rally together as a community and take out the men harmed them. There is “no out” or “internal displacement”[81]—no law and order that will help the trans women because Luna is cognisant of the fact that not only do hegemonic structures (such as the news, the law, political campaigns) not care about transgender women—neither does the radical feminist movement which actively works on excluding them.[82]

The ‘knives’ in Luna’s title can then be read as referring to the trans women’s method of killing their attackers, while also referring to the long cinematic history of treating the gender-ambiguous killer’s penis as a phallic weapon[83], which also mirrors the long history of treating transgender women as rapists/killers who use their penises as a weapon in feminist and lesbian safe-spaces.[84] Bubbles, Pinky, and Rachel are coming with their knives-as-weapons and taking back their knives-as-penises at the same time, since it was precisely their ‘knives’ (as in the pre-op body) that caused them harm in the first place. Bubbles was raped by Boner because he did not know she was trans until he, presumably, saw her penis; now she takes back her body through her knives (penis and weapon) and uses both to annihilate him. Through the final battle, the film overwrites the original fight scene where two transgender women died; now we have three transgender women surviving and three cisgender men dead. The final act of the rape-revenge has consistently worked by inverting the power structure of victim/killer and male/female,[85] but with Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives, the power dynamic of cis/trans are also inverted. By surviving to the end of the film, these three trans women manage to become the “final girls” since “in outwitting the killer,” they force “male viewers to see themselves in her.”[86]

Conclusion

The last scene of Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives has the three remaining transgender women standing over the body of Boner. With their mission now over, they all sigh before Pinky laughs.

Pinky: You know the difference between us and them?

Tipper and Bubbles: No. What?

Pinky: Me either.[87]

Pinky’s ending line communicates what Luna has been articulating all along: there is absolutely no difference between transgender women and their killers—which means that transgender people are just like cisgender people. They are no more the victim than they are the killers in this story, but since transgender people have been systematically oppressed for decades, Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives represents an ending where, for once, they can prevail and survive.

Luna’s 2010 film marks a critical juncture in transgender cinema and exploitation film. Indeed, Luna’s film can only be understood by analysing both genres that have come before it through an affective framework of ‘retrospectatorship’ of the grindhouse era and a critical attention to the ways in which transgender bodies have been represented on screen and through the radical feminist movement. Luna’s transgender characters are not monstrous transgender bodies that a Final Girl can annihilate in order to re-establish hegemonic order; they are the Final Girls who survive in spite of violence and force a cisgender audience to see them as just like themselves. Pinky, Rachel, and Bubbles are women dealing with sexual violence like any main character of a rape-revenge film—but by including these trans characters alongside women like Jennifer of I Spit on Your Grave, Israel Luna presents a film that subverts the typical discourse surrounding trans women and grants them space and validation on the screen. For the future of the horror film, there need to be many more directors like Luna so that transgender women and their representation can continue to survive.

Notes

[1] Steinmetz, Katy, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” Time Magazine, 29 May 2014, (Accessed: April 9 2017).

[2] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Reel Gender: Examining the politics of trans images in media and film,” (PhD diss, University of Ohio, 2009), 180.

[3] Clover, Carol J, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender In Modern Horror Films, (NY: Princeton University Press, 1992), 21.

[4] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Reel Gender,” 180.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Goff, Dafydd, “House at the End of the Street – review” The Guardian, 24 September 2012, (Accessed: April 1 2017).

[7] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Reel Gender,” 180.

[8] Ticked–Off Trannies with Knives, Dir Israel Luna, (US: La Luna Entertainment Company, 2010).

[9] Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, (Toronto: McFarland Company, 2011), 6-7.

[10] Brottman, Mikita, in Offensive Films: Towards an Anthropology of Cinema Vomotif, (Toronto: Praeger, 1997), 39.

[11] Villarreal, Daniel, “Gay Director Israel Luna is sick of Bashing Victims Sucking It Up. So he made a movie where they stab their attackers to death,” in Queerty.com, N.D. (Accessed: April 1 2017).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman On Sexism and The Scapegoating of Femininity. (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2007), 253.

[14] Lowder, Brian J, “The ‘Tranny Debate’ and the LGBTQ Movement” in Slate, 30 May 2014, (Accessed: May 2017).

[15] Bolcer, Julie, “Tribeca Protested for Ticked off Trannies With Knives” The Advocate, 07 April 2010, (Accessed: April 1 2017).

[16] Ticked–Off Trannies with Knives, Dir Israel Luna, (US: La Luna Entertainment Company, 2010).

[17] GLADD.com, “Demand that Ticked-off Trannies With Knives Be Pulled From Tribeca Film Festival.” N.D. https://www.glaad.org/calltoaction/032510, (Accessed April 8 2017).

[18] Ticked–Off Trannies with Knives, Dir Israel Luna, (US: La Luna Entertainment Company, 2010).

[19] Smith, Phyll, “‘This is Where We Came In’: The Economics of Unruly Audiences, Their Cinema and Tastes, From Serial Houses to Grind Houses,” in Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street and Beyond, ed. Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker, (NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 31; emphasis in original.

[20] Ward, Glenn, “Grinding Out The Grind House: Exploitation, Myth, and Memory,” in Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street and Beyond, ed. Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker, (NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 13.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Lindsey, Steven, “Dallas Filmmaker Israel Luna premiering new film in New York to much controversy,” in Pegasus News, 26 March 2010, (Accessed: February 2012).

[23] White, Patricia, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representatbility, (NY: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 196-197.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid, 91.

[26] Carroll, Rachel, Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities, (NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009), 43.

[27] Ward, Glenn, “Grinding Out The Grind House,”13.

[28] Carroll, Rachel, Adaptation in Contemporary Culture, 43.

[29] White, Patricia, Uninvited, 91.

[30] Serano, Julia, Whipping Girl, 40.

[31] Plett, Casey, “The Rise of the Gender Novel,” The Walrus, (18 March 2015, Accessed: 1 January 2017).

[32] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Reel Gender,” 1-9.

[33] Ibid, 180.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Sullivan, K.E., “Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer,” Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, 38-47.

[36] Ibid.

[37] The Silence of The Lambs, Dir Jonathan Demme, (US: Orion Pictures, 1991).

[38] Harris, Thomas, The Silence of the Lambs, (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 360.

[39] Prosser, Jay, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, (NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9.

[40] Prosser, Jay, Second Skins, 9-11.

[41] Connelly, Sherilyn, “The Big Reveal” Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, (NY: Seal Press, 2010), 97.

[42] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Reel Gender,” 180-182.

[43] Ibid, 194.

[44] Staubs, Savannah, “The Not So Hidden Transphobia In The Silence of The Lambs,” in The Sociological Cinema Blog, 25 August 2014, (Accessed: November 2016).

[45] Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (NY: Routledge, 1997), 116.

[46] Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, (NY: Duke University Press, 1995), 168.

[47] Goff, Dafydd, “House at the End of the Street – review.”

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Sullivan, K.E., “Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer,” 38-47.

[51] Clover, Carol, J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 56.

[52] Ibid; emphasis mine.

[53] Ibid, 51.

[54] Ibid, 56-7.

[55] Ibid, 4.

[56] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Death by Transphobia: Increasing Gender Awareness Through Teaching Transgender Day of Rememberance,” in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 19, No. 2, TEACHING THE BODY (Fall 2008 / Winter 2009), 81-91.

[57] Villarreal, Daniel, “Gay Director Israel Luna is sick of Bashing Victims Sucking It Up.”

[58] Ibid.

[59] White, Patricia, Uninvited, 91.

[60] Clover, Carol, J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, xii.

[61] Ibid, 119.

[62] Ibid, 120.

[63] Ibid, 119-120.

[64] Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, Rape-Revenge Films, 5.

[65] Zeisler, Andi, Feminism and Pop Culture, (NY: Seal Press, 2008), 73.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Williams, Linda in Zeisler, Andi, Feminism and Pop Culture, 74.

[68] Maron, Jeremy, “When the Final Girl is not a Girl: Reconsidering the Gender Binary in the Slasher Film,” in Off Screen Journal, Volume 19, Issue 1 January 2015, (Accessed: May 10 2017).

[69] Clover, Carol, J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 72.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, 100-105.

[72] Raymond, Janice, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, (NY: Teacher’s College Press, 1979), 119-135.

[73] Serano, Julia, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, (NY: Seal Press, 2013), 183-195.

[74] Serano, Whipping Girl, 40.

[75] Pham, Larissa, “Pseudo-Feminist Trolls are Still Trotting Out Tired, Anti-Trans Ideology,” in The Village Voice, 21 February 2017, (Accessed: April 1 2017).

[76] Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, 100.

[77] Clover, Carol J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, xii.

[78] Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, 83-84.

[79] Ibid, 100.

[80] Ryan, Joelle Ruby, “Reel Gender,” 153-162.

[81] Clover, Carol, J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 119-120.

[82] Pham, Larissa, “Pseudo-Feminist Trolls are Still Trotting Out Tired, Anti-Trans Ideology.”

[83] Clover, Carol J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, xii.

[84] Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, 100.

[85] Clover, Carol J., Men, Women, and Chainsaws, 120.

[86] Zeisler, Andi, Feminism and Pop Culture, 73.

[87] Ticked–Off Trannies with Knives, Dir Israel Luna, (US: La Luna Entertainment Company, 2010).

[i] The Latin prefix cis means ‘on the same side’, signaling that a cisgender person is someone who identifies with (is on the same side of) the birth gender they were given.

[ii] Like the film Jackie Brown, the character of Pinky can be viewed as a mixture of blaxploitation tropes. For more on blaxploitation, see Mikel J. Koven for more information.

[iii] A mondo film is one that presents real-life events, similar to a documentary, though it is mostly viewed from a sensational perspective. See Mikita Brottman for more information.

[iv] Jennifer is the main character from I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

Notes on Contributor

Evelyn Deshane has appeared in Plenitude Magazine, Postscript to Darkness, Strange Horizons, and in Tesseracts 19: Superhero Universe. Evelyn (pron. Eve-a-lyn) received an MA from Trent University and is currently studying for a PhD at Waterloo University. For more information about upcoming projects and collaborations, please visit: https://evedeshane.wordpress.com/

Bibliography

Bolcer, Julie. “Tribeca Protested for Ticked off Trannies With Knives.” The Advocate, 7 April 2010. Accessed: April 1 2017. http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/entertainment-news/2010/04/07/tribeca-protested-ticked-trannies-knives.

Brottman, Mikita. Offensive Films: Toward an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif. UK: Praeger, 1997.

Carroll, Rachel. Adaptation in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Rachel Carroll. NY: Continuum.

Clover, Carol, J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender In Modern Horror Films. NY: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Connelly, Sherilyn. “The Big Reveal.” Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Ed. Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. NY: Seal Press, 2010. Kindle Edition.

GLADD.com, “Demand that Ticked-off Trannies With Knives Be Pulled From Tribeca Film Festival.” N.D. https://www.glaad.org/calltoaction/032510. Accessed April 8 2017.

Goff, Dafydd. “House at the End of the Street – review.” The Guardian. 24 September 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/sep/24/house-at-end-of-street-review. Accessed April 1 2017.

Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and The Technology of Monsters. NY: Duke University Press, 1995.

Harris, Thomas. The Silence of The Lambs. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. E-Book.

Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study. Toronto: McFarland Company, 2011.

House at the End of the Street. Dir Mark Tonderai. US: Relativity Media, 2012.

Koven, Mikel J. Blaxploitation Films. NY: Oldcastle Books, 2010.

Let Me Die A Woman. Directed by Doris Wishman. US: Hygiene Films, 1977.

Lindsey, Steven, “Dallas Filmmaker Israel Luna premiering new film in New York to much controversy.”Pegasus News, 26 March 2010. Accessed: February 2012. http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2010/mar/26/dallas-filmmaker-israel-luna-premiering-new-film-n/

Lowder, Brian J. “The ‘Tranny Debate’ and the LGBTQ Movement.” Slate, 30 May 2014. Accessed: May 2017. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/05/30/is_tranny_a_slur_or_an_identity_who_decides.html

Maron, Jeremy. “When the Final Girl is not a Girl: Reconsidering the Gender Binary in the Slasher Film.” Off Screen Journal. Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2015. Accessed: May 10 2017. http://offscreen.com/view/reconsidering-the-final-girl

Pham, Larissa. “Pseudo-Feminist Trolls are Still Trotting Out Tired, Anti-Trans Ideology.” The Village Voice, 21 February 2017. Accessed: April 1 2017. http://www.villagevoice.com/news/pseudo-feminist-trolls-are-still-trotting-out-tired-anti-trans-ideology-9695867.

Plett, Casey. “The Rise of the Gender Novel.” The Walrus. 18 March 2015. Accessed: 1 January 2017.

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. NY: Columbia Press, 1998.

Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. NY: Teacher’s College Press, 1979.

Ruby, Joelle, Ryan. “Death by Transphobia: Increasing Gender Awareness Through Teaching Transgender Day of Remembrance.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 19, No. 2, TEACHING THE BODY (Fall 2008 / Winter 2009), 81-91.

—-. Reel Gender: Examining The Politics of Trans Images in Film and Media. PhD Diss. Ohio: Bowling Green State University, 2008.

Serano, Julia. Excluded: Making Queer and Feminist Movements More Inclusive. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2013. Kindle Edition.

—-. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman On Sexism and The Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2007. Kindle Edition.

The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. 1991. Burbank, CA: Orion Pictures. DVD.

Smith, Phyll. “‘This is Where We Came In’: The Economics of Unruly Audiences, Their Cinema and Tastes, From Serial Houses to Grind Houses.” Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street and Beyond. ed. Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker. NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Staubs, Savannah. “The Not So Hidden Transphobia In The Silence of The Lambs.” The Sociological Cinema Blog, 25 August 2014. (Accessed: November 2016). http://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/blog/the-not-so-hidden-transphobia-in-silence-of-the-lambs

Steinmetz, Katy. “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Time Magazine 29 May 2017. Accessed: April 9 2017. http://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/

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Sullivan, K.E. “Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. No. 43, July 2000, pp. 38-47.

Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives. Dir Israel Luna. US: La Luna Entertainment Company, 2010.

Villarreal, Daniel, “Gay Director Israel Luna is sick of Bashing Victims Sucking It Up. So he made a movie where they stab their attackers to death,” in Queerty.com, N.D. Accessed: April 1 2017. https://www.queerty.com/gay-director-israel-luna-is-sick-of-bashing-victims-sucking-it-up-so-he-made-a-movie-where-they-stab-their-attackers-to-death-20100122/2.

Ward, Glenn. “Grinding Out The Grind House: Exploitation, Myth, and Memory.” Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street and Beyond. Ed. Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker. NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

White, Patricia. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1999.

Zeisler, Andi. Feminism and Pop Culture. NY: Seal Press, 2008.

Choice is freedom. Though the complexity of neoliberal ideology has much more baggage and background than this short phrase, one might still be able to communicate the crux of neoliberal life in these three words. What then, occurs when choice is taken away? The lack of freedom, or the lack of choice, is perhaps the ultimate neoliberal nightmare: the worst-case scenario in a culture obsessed with individual control. How does one have the freedom to choose in the first place? One must have the financial freedom to do as she pleases. Two recent films demonstrate the horror of not having a choice, or the horror of being forced due to economic instability, and both films demonstrate this horror primarily through the character’s movement through space. It Follows (2015 David Robert Mitchell) and Don’t Breathe (2016 Fede Alvarez) both demonstrate this principle, but by opposite means—in It Follows the characters, victims of a nameless curse, experience forced and constant movement. In Don’t Breathe the young protagonist attempts to steal money from an elderly man’s home to escape her financial straits, resulting in her entrapment inside his home. In both films, the protagonists suffer due to economic circumstances. The economic undertone is subtler in It Follows, but the films together demonstrate the beginning of a trend: horror films that increasingly address neoliberal fears in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession. Though some academics and politicians declared the “death of neoliberalism” [1]after the recession, David Harvey promises otherwise, claiming that neoliberalism has been “a very successful project”.[2] Throughout this analysis of the ways in which these two horror films fittingly reflect middle-class horror at the idea of failing neoliberalism, I use Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism that emphasizes privatization, accumulation by dispossession, and the association of freedom with power as a consumer.

Though economic anxiety in both films is articulated substantially through the character’s relationships with space and mobility, I will also analyze the ways in which the specific spaces of homes, or domestic space, is navigated in the films. Another important trait uniting these films, despite their varying styles and approaches to character movement (or lack thereof), is their shared setting in Detroit, Michigan. I argue that in a neoliberal society, anxiety emerges in places that are inefficient in ways that “functioning” places of consumer capitalism work. These places feel entropic and dispersed, their chaos prevents the smooth flow of capital through them, and therefore they evoke anxiety for the neoliberal subject. Detroit and its surrounding areas have received attention as a recessionary “ground zero”, a city that has experienced some of the worst effects of the economic downturn.[3]  I include in this article an analysis of the significance of this specific geographical setting and its visual importance in the creation of anxiety. Finally, both films engage with visibility and invisibility, or the importance of what we see as an audience and what the characters can see in the films. Inevitably questions are raised about race and the invisibility of people of color in both films that take place in a city that has historically been and continues to be a site of significant racial inequality.

These films are simultaneously part of the tradition of making monsters of societal problems in horror films, whether those monsters are supernatural or otherwise, while paving the way for a shift in the horror genre. This shift centers on the decay of the post-recession city and its outlying suburban spaces as a symbol of cultural anxiety surrounding the destabilization of capitalist ideals. This paper continues the emerging practice of analyzing post-recession films as a way of interpreting the cultural importance of this recent economic catastrophe. Scholarly literature reveals that the horror genre has become a potent site for the articulation of economic anxieties in recent years. Drag Me to Hell (2009 Sam Raimi) for example focuses explicitly on a “domestic approach to recessionary horrors…and the financial fears of the ‘average’ white, middle-class American family”[4]. Most the films being analyzed by scholars in relation to the 2008 recession are indeed part of the horror genre which has long been the genre of choice for expressions of culturally significant fears. The connection between the rhetoric of economic crisis as a “force of nature” also has a precedent in a recent analysis of Eco-Catastrophe films, such as Take Shelter (2011 Jeff Nichols) whose “latent eco-anxiety then itself serves as a cover story of sorts for its depiction of recessionary woes”[5]. Though Boyle relates the language of economic crisis to the “once-in-a-lifetime credit tsunami”[6], he also refers to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s description of capitalism as “a perennial gale of creative destruction”.[7] The metaphorical language used to describe economic crises and the inability, or perhaps unwillingness to form straightforward explanations of these events has significance in It Follows which will be explored. Addressing the fears and anxieties present in domestic spaces in post-recession America are films such as Paranormal Activity (2007 Oren Peli) and Paranormal Activity II (2010 Todd Williams) which, “are tales of the recession, not only because they stress our blithe disregard for steady, inevitable advance of a monster, but also because they track the gradual collapse of consumer capitalist dreams”.[8] Similar themes emerge in both It Follows and Don’t Breathe, placing them squarely within the emerging practice of analyzing films specifically in relation to the economic recession of 2008.

Movement Through Space

After a scene in It Follows in which nineteen-year-old Jay has sex in the back seat of a car, she lays casually across the seat of the vehicle and soliloquizes as her date, twenty-one-year-old Hugh, goes around to the back of the car. She says,

“It’s funny. I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates; drive around with friends in their cars. I had this image of myself; holding hands with a really cute guy, listening to the radio, driving along some pretty road, up north maybe; when the trees start to change colors. It was never about going anywhere really. Just having some sort of freedom I guess. Now that we’re old enough, where the hell do we go?”

As Jay finishes her speech, Hugh enters the back seat, affectionately embracing her before reaching around and knocking her unconscious with a cloth soaked in chloroform. So begins the unveiling of the curse: a person, who can take the form of anyone, friend, family, or stranger, in order to get close to you. The curse is passed on through sex, and no one knows how it began. In this scene, it is Hugh’s intention to pass the curse to Jay, therefore furthering himself from its effects. However, if the curse kills Jay, it will come after Hugh, and then the person who gave it to him, and so on. This film can be read as a profound commentary on the anxiety of millennials in post-recession America. The curse in It Follows is representative of the curse of economic collapse that may presumably follow younger generations indefinitely into their futures. The passing along of the curse mimics the inevitability of participation in an already corrupt system: characters have the ultimatum to be a part of the problem, or die. This timely concept is subtly explored in the film by means of movement and space. Jay shifts from a normal, middle class life to feeling terrorized by the need to keep on the move—the opposite of the freedom of movement she dreams of in her speech in Hugh’s car. This forced movement evokes an undercurrent reflective of economic anxiety in the film.

Don’t Breathe, on the other hand, depicts the spatial representation of economic anxiety in a drastically different way. The protagonist, a young woman named Rocky, similar in age to Jay, also must engage in corruption to try and escape her circumstances. The anxiety in Don’t Breathe is less mysterious, and more concrete than the curse in It Follows. Rocky is clearly affected by her financial situation from the start—she and her two friends, Alex and Money, are thieves, and choose to break into the home of an army veteran to steal the cash he supposedly keeps in his house. The man has the money from a legal settlement after the death of his daughter. It becomes clear that this money has not helped to alleviate the old man’s suffering or speed his mourning process. In the middle of the film viewers discover that he has kidnapped the women who killed his daughter in a car accident and is holding her prisoner in his basement. In this way, the film is straightforward about the idea that relying on capital as a means of freedom or happiness is insufficient, and that it can in fact lead to deeper corruption than the legal punishment the old man claims he would have preferred. He explains to Rocky that he believes the woman should have gone to jail, but laments that “rich girls don’t go to jail”. In lieu of state-sanctioned imprisonment, he perversely takes the matter of this perceived injustice into his own hands.

Early in the film Rocky believes that if she gets the money she needs she can be happy—but why has she resorted to stealing? In the film, there are several indicators of the depressed economy, such as the joblessness of the young people that lead to their delinquency, and the spaces of decay, such as the neighborhood where the old man lives, filled with foreclosed homes. Like It Follows, the setting of urban decay effectively represents the presence of economic recession. Though Jay and Rocky seem to be in opposite positions, one forced to constantly be on the move, and the other trapped inside a house, their situations are symptoms of the same economic problems, and representative of the same economic anxiety.

Domestic Spaces & Generational Tension

Domestic spaces are a site of contestation in both films because of economic downturn, which results in anxiety surrounding homes. Domestic space “ought” to be safe and comforting, but it becomes a contested space during times of economic instability. In It Follows, after Hugh drops Jay off at her home and disappears, she learns that Hugh is not his real name–he is actually Jeff. As it turns out, twenty-one-year-old Jeff is living at home with his parents. Though the film is anachronistic, both Jay and Hugh, and potentially the rest of the young adults, can be read as boomerang kids: young adults who choose or are forced to live with or move back in with their parents due to financial hardship. This aligns well with the nature of the curse following the young people forever, as “the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears”.[9] Though there are admittedly other factors involved in an adult child living with his or her parents, the 2008 economic recession caused a noticeable spike in this trend.[10] It is likely that even if they do make it out of their parents’ houses, the curse of financial hardship, like the curse in the film, will slowly follow them forever.

In Don’t Breathe Rocky’s home life is notably worse than Jay’s is at the beginning of the film. She lives in a rundown home where she clearly feels unsafe. Though we are not told Rocky’s age, she is perhaps also a boomerang kid, unable to support herself outside of her mother’s home, even though her motivation to get away from that home is strong. Early in the film, a short scene in Rocky’s home conveys the economic desperation of her family. Rocky, her young sister Diddy, and her mother all live in a small trailer. Her mother harasses her about how she makes her money, accusing her of engaging in sex work. This ninety-second scene is enough to highlight the strength of Rocky’s desire to get away from her unsatisfying home life. The home of the old man she and her companions break into is in a rundown neighborhood with many boarded up houses. This depiction of a post-recession suburb as a place where horrifying events occur feeds into neoliberal fears about economic downturn and the real places affected by them. It is likely that when the old man first arrived in this neighborhood, that it was a thriving suburb of middle class people. However, the housing crisis and economic recession have turned it into a space of anxiety-inducing decay.

The old man distrusts the bank to keep his money safe, so he keeps it in this isolated domestic space. In this way, the film calls attention to the instability of neoliberalism, which focuses on the importance of deregulation, or free market capitalism, as well as privatization of public goods such as utilities, welfare, and public institutions like universities.[11] The privatization of public goods has not benefitted people aside from the owners of these now private companies or corporations. The housing crisis that aided in setting off the 2008 recession is an example of this because in a capitalist economic system, “…there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of ‘the debt trap’ as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession…debt crises in individual counties, uncommon during the 1960’s, became very frequent during the 1980’s and 1990’s, culminating in the financial crash of 2008”.[12] No doubt the old man doesn’t trust a bank to keep his $300,000 settlement safe after a bank crisis, and after what he views as a failure on behalf of the court system to convict the young woman who killed his daughter in a car accident. And yet the old man’s distrust is conveyed as pathological in the film—he is a sadist and a murderer. Though he does not trust a bank with his money, he believes in the stronghold of his own home because of its familiarity, despite the precariousness of the housing market made visible by the entire street of foreclosed homes surrounding his. Despite the generational gap, the young people in the film distrust the system as well, albeit perhaps for different reasons. Were it not for this mistrust, perhaps they would not have turned to criminal activity to make money in the first place.

Urban Space & Decay

The economic anxiety reflected in the film highlights the disillusionment and fear of the generation for whom the 2008 recession could very well have the highest burden: young adults. The movement and entrapment of the characters throughout the film, particularly Jay and Rocky, show the ways in which the curse of a broken economy makes spaces typically deemed safe seem dangerous and unsettling. The setting of the film amidst the actual urban decay of Detroit is highly important for a study of the effect of place as it reflects economic anxiety in the films.

Director David Robert Mitchell takes advantage of the setting in Detroit and the surrounding area for It Follows, which results in scenes of urban decay as well as anachronism, both of which add to the potential for a symptomatic reading of post-recession economic anxiety. The anachronism of the film creates the sense that perhaps it is set in the past or present— but perhaps it is set in the future, and further in the future than we realize. This is because of the potential for ongoing economic problems for those who came of age during a recession. None of the characters have new or up to date cars or electronics, perhaps because they can’t afford them. In this way, the horror in the film is created by showing the potential worsening of economic conditions: “What art-horror often shows us is that it is being in the world itself in any of all of its manifestations that has become uncanny and monstrous”.[13] For the characters in both films, being in the world itself includes being within a capitalist system, which can be thought of as a monster itself. Though this monstrous system functions invisibly, the films make it visible. Place in the films is anything but inert scenery. The decay of the space of the houses and the city itself are problematic within a neoliberal ideology that only wants to acknowledge progress forward, without a recognition of the regression, decay and death that capitalism causes. The imminent decay of the domestic and urban environment show the material effects of economic downturn, and show that “Nothing need be as it is; anything could break apart at any moment”.[14] This way of thinking is in direct opposition to the notions put forth by neoliberal ideologies that refuse to acknowledge the possibility for decline as a potential outcome of a capitalist system.

In these films, the characters move in and out of these spaces of decay. In It Follows the landscape is introduced to the viewer mostly through panning shots of the broken-down houses and buildings from the window of a moving vehicle. This movement implies that these aren’t places in which one can or should stay, and they reflect the ways in which an ideological bubble—not just a housing bubble— popped after the recession of 2008. In a post-recession landscape of decay and uncertainty, forced from the safety of their homes, Jay and her friends are “dispersed beings”[15] along with the cityscape in a way that evokes anxiety. The space itself has entered a state of entropy, a state of lessened control and therefore lessened potential for economic productivity because of its decline. This spatial breakdown results in the embodiment of dispersion. In other words, Jay and her friends are dispersed beings because they now lack security, and “both security and the self have been understood in terms of spatial relations.”[16] Their relationship to space fundamentally changes once they are cursed.  In Don’t Breathe there are several aerial shots of the foreclosed neighborhoods in which the film takes place. This gives the impression that this master shot, this powerful view from an elevated position, is aware of the problems these neighborhoods face. This view from above, perhaps representative of the gaze of capitalistic systems of power, does nothing to intervene. The old man’s relationship with his house as a safe space par excellence conveys his personal fight against becoming a dispersed being, “Without [the house], man would be a dispersed being…it is body and soul”.[17] The man is ultimately less concerned about Rocky making off with his settlement money in the end than he is about the security of his home.

Fear, Anxiety & Intentional Obscurity

One of the major questions in It Follows is never answered: Where did the curse come from? How was it created? Significantly, it doesn’t have a name, nor does it earn one. This signifies an important distinction between fear and anxiety—fear springs from something that can be named, and potentially known and explained, and anxiety is created from the uncanny, something that cannot be named or pinned down.[18] Economic anxiety is partially due to the intentional obfuscation of how and why downturns happen—when people are unsure about how and why something bad occurs, the level of anxiety about it increases because of this obscurity. In this way, the curse is much like a financial crisis—uncanny because it seems impossible based on neoliberal ideals, yet it occurs nonetheless. Though there is most certainly a point of origin for the curse—logically, someone had to be the first carrier of it—this information is not provided to the characters or the audience. This lack of information, the “unease of indeterminateness”[19] gives the curse its power. The curse can appear as anyone, friend, family, or stranger, just as economic strife can take numerous disparate forms for those faced with its effects, and it can seem unclear why the crisis is happening.

Economic crises, however, far from being the “perfect storm”[20] of uncontrollable factors occurring simultaneously as they are often represented in the media, are the result of calculated but careless policy decisions at the corporate and government levels. Perhaps the true horror, then, is knowing that these decisions are being made behind closed doors, without citizens’ best interests in mind, and with intentional obscurity to more easily displace blame. If, in a capitalist system, those in power have so much control, how does the average person escape the ills of the economy from which she cannot extricate herself? It is here, at the intersection of the curse and the impossibility of escape, where anxiety and horror mix to create a subtle but scathing economic critique in It Follows. In Don’t Breathe, the old man the group plans to rob is blind. Throughout the film, he remains blind to the corruption he engages in, believing he is carrying out what he views as justice, and he ultimately gets away with it. The way in which the events occur in the house as we, the audience, see them, and the way in which they are then represented by the media at the end of the film, convey an important factor about what people see—which is that people see what powerful institutions want them to see, especially when it comes to complex situations like economic crisis. This often includes the twisting of facts and intentional obfuscation.

The final few minutes of Don’t Breathe are important as a final evaluation of the cultural critiques the film makes. As Rocky makes her way through the bus station with Diddy, finally on their way out of Detroit, stolen money in tow, she sees a news story on TV about the old man. The media is framing the old man as a victim of two young criminals—Alex and Money– abusing him. His veteran status is mentioned, the rhetoric of the “bullied hero” is used by the news caster, and most importantly, he is not dead. It appears to the audience that Rocky’s blows to the old man before she finally escapes his house are deadly; however, he is revived when the police arrive. Both the representation of the story on the news, depicting him as a victim when viewers know better, as well as his survival, are symbolic of the perpetuation of a corrupt system, even with Rocky’s temporary reprieve in her attempt to leave. Rocky is visibly horrified by the news story, even though she has the $300,000 she stole so she could move. Her palpable anxiety at the knowledge that this man is still alive, and that he is being protected by the law and painted as not only an innocent victim but as a hero, is representative of an awareness of a corrupt system, yet never being able to “truly” escape—a situation which creates ongoing anxiety. The final shot of the scene shows Rocky and Diddy walking away, their backs to the camera—as if they are being watched. The final shot in It Follows shows Jay hand in hand with a young man, Paul, with whom she now shares the burden of the curse. A mysterious figure walks after them in the background, out of focus. Though they are not panicking in this moment, that blurry figure causes the viewer a sense of dread—for Rocky, there is no true escape from her entrapment, and for Jay, there is no place of safety or respite where she will not be followed by the curse.

Visibility & Invisibility

The concept of sight plays an important role in both films worth expanding on further. After their sexual encounter, Hugh makes sure that Jay sees the curse following her so that she believes that it exists. In this way, he attempts to reveal to her the inevitable instability of the structure in which everyone is trapped. Without seeing the curse follow her, Jay would be unlikely to believe him about its existence. In order to show Jay the curse, Hugh partially immobilizes her. After knocking her unconscious, he ties her to a wheel chair. This scene opens in an abandoned parking garage, where Jay is simultaneously mobile and immobile—she is tied to the wheel chair, but the wheel chair itself can move. This is symbolic of the type of movement allowed in a neoliberal society; only certain types of movement are allowed, and the movement itself is an illusion of freedom. Freedom within a neoliberal ideology ties directly to consumer capitalism. If one is free to spend and make money, one is considered free. During an economic downturn, this freedom disappears for many people for whom it was not previously a concern, and instead of mobility by free will, one might become forced to mobilize, or on the other hand, forced to stay in place. The wheel chair scene captures this idea, while introducing to Jay and the viewer to what the curse looks like and how it behaves.

In Don’t Breathe, one of the significant details of the story is the old man’s blindness. The trio thinks that he will be easier to steal from because of this but they are proven very wrong. The old man’s blindness is indicative of his ignorance of the economic system of which he is a part; but his blindness does not hinder him. In fact, in strengthens him. Within his blindness, he is depicted as a non-threat. Though the fact of the old man’s blindness is open to myriad interpretations, his blindness and the power he retains in spite of it can be interpreted as a complex symbol regarding who “sees” and does not “see” the various facets of an economic crisis such as the 2008 recession. Neoliberal ideology strives to persuade that the world is flat; in other words, anyone is capable of horizontal movement that might allow them to make money, if they so desire, and if people are not able to obtain class mobility on their own, it is a fault of theirs as opposed to the fault of the capitalist system.[21] Governments that support free-market capitalism support this ideology, therefore turning a blind eye, as it were, to people who suffer within this system. Instead of addressing this suffering, “The idea is put about that problems arise only because of lack of competitive strength or because of personal, cultural, and political failings”.[22] Privatization, though originally lauded as a tool to stimulate weak economies[23] has proven a successful method of “accumulation by dispossession”.[24] In other words, citizens are forced to pay for services originally provided through the government. Thus, corporations and private shareholders gain more wealth, as lower classes lose wealth, and the gap continues to widen.[25] The depiction of the old man as a victim at the end of the film resonates with the way that corporations are depicted by the American mass media. Corporate entities tend to be depicted as helping the economy, creating jobs, and fueling free-market capitalism that “evens the playing field”. When corporations are accused of unfair practices, they are depicted as victims of harassment and slander. However, by inferring that these “blind” entities are adept and know exactly what they are doing, and that they do not exist to help, the film can be read as symptomatic of these complex relationships of ignorance and wishful thinking about corporate altruism and government protection from corrupt economic practices.

Though I argue for the specificity of both films settings in post-recession Detroit, the history of the city and its tense racial history also raises questions of visibility in these films. Notably, there are no people of color in either film. In this way, both films reflect the phenomenon of white flight from the inner city and the legacy of fear this created among those suburbanites who are perhaps depicted in both films. One of the biggest indicators of the curse in It Follows aligning with not only economic decline, but its association with racial tensions and anxieties is the progression of the spaces from which Jay is forced— and those that she and her group of friends are forced into—because Jay is being followed. Near the end of the film, Yara, Jay’s friend says, “When I was a little girl, my parents wouldn’t allow me to go south of eight-mile… and I didn’t even know what that meant until I got a little older. And I started realizing that’s where the city started and the suburbs ended.” As the group of friends was growing up, they were not allowed into the city proper, because it was a space coded as dangerous for them by their parents—likely the children of those who left the cities themselves. Issues of urban poverty have historically been largely under-addressed in mass media. Similar to the way in which the prison system in the United States claims to be “officially colorblind”[26], free market capitalism is the ultimate perpetrator of a similar blindness of both color and class. In urban areas such as Detroit however, race and class are always already enmeshed. Jay’s situation in It Follows is more representative of post-recession focus on the negative effects on mostly white, middle class people and their increasingly precarious economic stability, the same group of people that media focused on during the recession. Don’t Breathe perhaps resonates more closely with the invisibility of the urban poor—those who have been systematically oppressed by widening economic disparities for decades. Rocky becomes trapped. She has the desire for mobility, but she struggles greatly to attain it. Her struggle is highlighted and glorified in the film; the struggle to attain economic mobility for people of color living in the same area Rocky supposedly lives in are not only not glorified, but not represented at all.

The lack of racial representation in both films may be read as a continued failing on behalf of mainstream cinema to represent racial diversity on-screen, especially regarding stories of racial inequality. In Don’t Breathe the character Money, Rocky’s boyfriend at the beginning of the film, embodies a problematic appropriation of black racial identity. His death early in the film due to his aggression during the break-in is a troubling moment because of its racialized depiction of violence. Though neither film contains people of color, these issues haunt the periphery of both films. Jay and her friends are forced into the supposed dangerous racialized space of the inner city because of the curse following her, though the only danger they encounter there is that of the economic curse following them–the same “curse” that impoverished inner-city dwellers have experienced for decades due to not only economic disparity and lack of adequate public services, but ongoing and entrenched racism.[27] Rocky and those in her group of friends breaking the law to try to escape their circumstances are depicted as the underdog heroes of their story. Rocky escapes with her life, and with the money she sought, though her companions were not so fortunate. The old man does not report that she had been in his house—he only tells the police about her two companions. Rocky’s whiteness inevitably plays into this narrative. The old man may indeed be “colorblind” because he cannot see anyone, but the audience can. Rocky’s whiteness causes us to question who is not seen onscreen in Don’t Breathe, those whose stories remain untold in the wake of a recession whose news coverage paid strict attention to the white families affected by the economic downturn, while hiding from media view the deepening despair of those already in poverty.

Conclusion

Given the time during which It Follows and Don’t Breathe were released, 2015 and 2016, in addition to their setting in suburban and urban Detroit, it is reasonable to read for these sociocultural conditions as part of the subtext of the films. The distrust of the government to properly fix or even help after the recession of 2008 is expressed through the anxiety with which cursed characters such as Jay, or fearful characters such as Rocky must now live their lives. The forced movement of the characters in It Follows through a landscape of decaying cities and their suburbs creates the perpetual anxiety experienced by a young generation grappling with the failure of consumer capitalism and neoliberalism and left with no way out; with no sense of peace or hopefulness for the future. Likewise, the entrapment within a house in an isolated neighborhood from which everyone has fled or was evicted due to foreclosure in Don’t Breathe mimics the feelings of hopelessness that Rocky feels due to her financial instability, and the ongoing injustice and misunderstanding of the economic straights she experiences by the media, as depicted in the crucial final scene of the film. Within the focus on the anxiety surrounding economic downtown in the films, there remains much to be said about the ways in which gender plays a crucial role in both films, considering that the protagonist of each film is a young female who inevitably experiences space and movement through space differently than male characters. Sexuality and conservative values are also a potential site of ongoing analysis in It Follows especially, considering that the curse is passed on through sex; notably casual, premarital sex, which results in unending problems for those cursed characters. Though I analyze issues of race and invisibility in the films, this issue in the films could also evoke further significant scholarship. While the address of economic themes in both films is not necessarily meant as an evaluation of the quality of the films, I have aimed to analyze and compare an important emerging trend: post-2008 recession economic anxiety in two recent horror films geared toward young audiences—the very youth who are likely to be affected by these problems far into their futures.

Notes

[1] David Primrose, “Contesting Capitalism in the Light of the Crisis: A Conversation with David Harvey,” The Journal of Australian Political Economy 71 (2013): 5.

[2] Primrose, “Contesting Capitalism,” 6.

[3] “How Detroit, the Motor City, turned into a ghost town” Paul Harris, accessed March 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/01/detroit-michigan-economy-recession-unemployment.

[4] April Miller, “Real-to-Reel Recessionary Horrors in Drag Me to Hell and Contagion,” The Great Recession in Fiction, Film and Television: Twenty-first-century Bust Culture (2013): 45.

[5] Kirk Boyle, “The Imagination of Economic Disaster: Eco-Catastrophe Films of the Great Recession,” The Great Recession in Fiction, Film and Television: Twenty-first-century Bust Culture (2013): 19.

[6] Boyle, “The Imagination,” 3.

[7] Boyle, “The Imagination,” 5.

[8] James D. Stone, “Horror at the Homestead: The (Re)possession of American Property in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity II,” The Great Recession in Fiction, Film and Television: Twenty-first-century Bust Culture (2013): 51

[9] “It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave,” Adam Davidson, accessed May 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/magazine/its-official-the-boomerang-kids-wont-leave.html?_r=0

[10] Sara E. Sandberg-Thoma, Anastasia R. Snyder, & Bohyun Joy Jang, “Exiting and Returning to the Parental Home for Boomerang Kids,” Journal of Marriage and Family 77.3 (2015): 87.

[11] David Harvey, “The Flat World of Neoliberal Utopianism,” in Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia U.P., 2009): 68-69.

[12] Harvey, “The Flat World,” 70.

[13] Paul Santilli, “Culture, Evil, and Horror,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66.1 (2007): 180

[14] Santilli, “Culture, Evil,” 182

[15] Samira Kawash, “Safe House?: Body, Building, and the Question of Security,” Cultural Critique 45 (2000): 202.

[16] Kawash, “Safe House?” 199.

[17] Kawash, “Safe House?” 202.

[18] Noëlle McAfee, “Abject Strangers: Toward an Ethics of Respect” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993): 122.

[19] McAfee, “Abject Strangers,” 122.

[20] “How the ‘Perfect Storm’ became the Perfect Cop-Out,” Charles Homans, accessed May 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/how-the-perfect-storm-became-the-perfect-cop-out.html

[21] Harvey, “The Flat World,” 67.

[22] Harvey, “The Flat World,” 67.

[23] Harvey, “The Flat World,” 56.

[24] Harvey, “The Flat World,” 68.

[25] Harvey, “The Flat World,” 61.

[26] Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow” in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New, 2010): 183.

[27] Patrick Sharkey, “Introduction” to Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality (Chicago: U of Chicago, 2013): 15.

Notes on Contributor

Joni Hayward is currently earning a PhD in Media, Cinema and Digital studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research interrogates the intersections of social justice and economics, and she has also written about violence on-screen, as well as feminism and affect in contemporary cinema. Her most recent project expands into the documentary film genre, with a focus on the visual culture surrounding the environmental movement, environmental documentary, and activism.

Bibliography

Alexander, Michelle. “The New Jim Crow.” The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised Edition ed. New York: New, 2010. 178-220. Print.

Boyle, Kirk. “The Imagination of Economic Disaster: Eco-Catastrophe Films of the Great Recession.” The Great Recession in Fiction, Film and Television: Twenty-first-century Bust Culture. Ed. Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013. 3-27. Print.

Harvey, David. “The Flat World of Neoliberal Utopianism.” Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia U.P., 2009. 51-76. Print

Kawash, Samira. “Safe House?: Body, Building, and the Question of Security”. Cultural Critique 45 (2000): 185–221. JSTOR Web. 6 April. 2016.

McAfee, Noëlle. “Abject Strangers: Toward an Ethics of Respect.” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Routledge, 1993. 16-34. Print.

Miller, April. “Real-to-Reel Recessionary Horrors in Drag Me to Hell and Contagion.” The Great Recession in Fiction, Film and Television: Twenty-first-century Bust Culture. Ed. Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013. 29-49. Print.

Primrose, David. “Contesting Capitalism in the Light of the Crisis: A Conversation with David Harvey.” The Journal of Australian Political Economy, no. 71, 2013, pp. 5–25.

Sandberg-Thoma, Sara E, Anastasia R Snyder, and Bohyun Joy Jang. “Exiting and Returning to the Parental Home for Boomerang Kids.” Journal of Marriage and Family 77.3 (2015): 806-818. Web.

Santilli, Paul. “Culture, Evil, and Horror”. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 66.1 (2007): 173–194. Web. 23 Mar. 2016.

Sharkey, Patrick. “Introduction.” Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2013. 1-23. Print.

Stone, James D. “Horror at the Homestead: The (Re)possession of American Property in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity II.” The Great Recession in Fiction, Film and Television: Twenty-first-century Bust Culture. Ed. Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013. 51-65. Print.

Filmography

Don’t Breathe. Dir. Fede Alvarez 2016

Drag Me to Hell Dir. Sam Raimi 2009

It Follows. Dir. David Robert Mitchell 2015

Paranormal Activity Dir. Oren Peli 2007

Paranormal Activity II Dir. Todd Williams 2010

Take Shelter Dir. Jeff Nichols 2011

Promotional image provided, with thanks by Kino Świat

Heralded as a Polish cannibal horror mermaid musical, The Lure was released theatrically in the United States in early 2017 – no easy feat for a low-budget debut of a newcomer, Agnieszka Smoczyńska. Written by an acclaimed young Polish playwright and screenwriter, Robert Bolesto, the film “is inspired by the kitschy world of big dancehall parties from the era of communism” and revolves around two teenage mermaids, Silver and Golden, and their rocky journey towards adulthood.[i] Interestingly, Western mainstream reviewers, while applauding The Lure for its dizzying display of phantasmagorical sequences and noting its not-too-subtle commentary on girlhood and female desire, have failed to see its political undertones.[ii] The reason for this omission may be simply cultural differences that make it difficult for Western reviewers to trace the intricate web of social and political references and allusions, which is why they concentrate instead on the (supposedly) universal cinematic language, popular fairy-tale tropes, and familiar horror imagery. What is more, in contrast to other popular Polish films which have been warmly received by the West (such as The Collector, Feliks Falk, 2005; Aftermath, Władysław Pasikowski, 2012; Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013; Spoor, Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik, 2017), The Lure does not wear its political badge proudly and visibly, and Western audiences do not get a piece of Polish political history served to them on a silver platter together with footnotes and easily accessible explanations. If anything, the politics of The Lure is elusive, meandering, and concealed in the myriad details, resonances, and obscure allusions that populate the screen and which, more often than not, resemble afterthoughts and afterimages rather than a straight-forward social commentary.

The way I will use politics throughout this essay echoes Rosi Braidotti’s distinction between politics and the political (or “LA politique” and “LE politique”), with the former being a form of organized, majoritarian politics “made of progressive emancipatory measures” and the latter understood as “radical self-styling” and “transformative experimentation with new arts of existence and ethical relations.”[iii] Granted, The Lure does not offer much in the way of “la politique,” as it does not engage with majoritarian narratives of Polish history. It does engage with the concept of “le politique” in that it enters into a multi-person dialogue with everyday Polish history (rather than the official History), popular music genres, the Polish entertainment scene of the 1980s, a variety of associations with mermaids and, more generally, Polish Romanticism. I would like to argue that these discursive layers cannot be extricated from the material planes, as The Lure also activates synaesthetic sensations and affective states that lead the viewers in and out of mnemonic trips, detours, and cul-de-sacs of the past.

The Lure is not an empty eggshell of a film that is all form and glitter, and no real substance at all. This is not to say that films need to transcend their form in order to lay high-brow, abstract nourishment at the viewers’ feet. Rather, all films are always already political and politicised, but some varieties of political engagement and social commentary are more difficult to identify than others or might be located on the affective rather than the discursive plane. Clearly, the two mermaid sisters’ savagery and frailty could be read solely in terms of female monstrosity, an uncanny fear of female genitalia, the horror of menarche, taboo fantasies of slippery hybridity and nonhuman sexuality (to name just a few potential avenues for analysis), but I would also like to examine how a different type of social commentary is proposed by Smoczyńska with and through her employment of the horrific, the surreal, and the fantastic.

In the first part I will briefly comment on my methodology and the ways the discursive-material approach may benefit from Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. Then I move on to the figure of a mermaid (syrena) in Polish culture, and the ways in which The Lure imbricates itself in the discussion concerning the emergence of Polish middle-class and its attendant fears and anxieties. Thirdly, following the debate concerning social groups and classes in Poland, I would like to look at the uneasy relationship between the savvy capital city dwellers and the unpolished, yet hugely talented, outsiders, which can be traced through the deceptively simple lyrics of one of film’s dazzling musical numbers. Lastly, I am interested in the ways in which The Lure stylizes itself as a nostalgic nod towards the 1980s and how the horror is used to comment on and undercut this nostalgia.

Beyond the Screen: A word on methodology

My own work is heavily indebted to Anna Powell’s insightful book-length study Deleuze and Horror and her series of shorter articles on the potential applications of both Deleuze’s Cinema I and II books and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalytic approach developed mostly in their two-volume opus magnum, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Though Deleuze concentrated on auteur and canonical cinema in his own writing on cinema, Powell convincingly argues for schizoanalytical readings of popular and mainstream films. Horror films, in particular, “are strong on affective impact and offer an intensive experience of fear and desire.”[iv] And thus Powell’s comment on the aesthetics of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) can be applied to a number of contemporary horror productions: “[t]hey stimulate, repel, frighten, distress and disorientate the spectator in a dizzying vortex, schizophrenising us as we lose the clear distinction of inside and out during the film even.”[v]

In her analysis of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy (2004), Powell employs three types of books theorized by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: the root, the radicle, and the rhizome.[vi] While the arborescent or root book reflects the world without much consideration and replicates hierarchies and social formations, the second type, the radicle book, though cut off from the main root or maimed through formal experimentation, retains the structure and unity of the root and offers an imitation of the world rather than something entirely new. Finally, the rhizome book “is a much more conjunctive, inclusive and productive assemblage,” which connects disparate elements, or singularities, through a simple gesture of addition rather than through a complex chain of signification or cause and effect.[vii]

The Lure could also be read through these three types of organization, which, as should be stressed, are not mutually exclusive and can intertwine freely. As a root text, The Lure revolves around a well-known fairy tale (Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”) set within the framework of a sparkly retro musical and a tragicomic coming-of-age story. The plot is thus highly predictable and the gory ending comes as no surprise. As a radicle text, The Lure self-reflexively comments on the figure of a Polish mermaid (which, in turn, generates a number of Romantic, urban, and communist associations), and attempts to break out of the constraints of a conventional musical by relying on idiosyncratic, eerie lyrics, whose role in pushing the plot forward is tangential at best. In The Lure’s case, the radicle smoothly intersects with the rhizomatic organization. It is within this last perspective that one can see the conjunctive synthesis of singularities, whose coupling rests on the flow of generative desire rather than a negative lack and a longing for the lost past. The affectionate nostalgia for the 1980s that The Lure espouses is celebrated and exaggerated, but also made horrific and uncanny. The “distinctive innovations” (or singularities, as Deleuze and Guattari call them) that are joined in The Lure encompass an excess of themes, which was jokingly noted by many reviewers in the tongue-in-cheek description of the film as a cannibal mermaid musical horror.[viii] This surplus of tropes and genres amuses and surprises, but they do actually work in Smoczyńska’s film.

Perhaps the most useful conceptual tool used to describe the cinematic event that is The Lure is the concept of a body without organs (BwO). Deleuze and Guattari describe BwO as “glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, folding, and recoiling that compose an organism – and also a signification and a subject – occur.”[ix] The two competing and cooperating directions – towards chaos and towards organization inform the way The Lure can be experienced by a viewer. Each stratum, each chain of signification, each instance of hierarchized order, each social formation that The Lure surveys is shaken and disturbed by lines of flight striving towards experimentation and smooth space. The most visible social formation that The Lure investigates is, of course, the late 1980s communist Warsaw and its dance hall scene. And yet as I would like to argue later this highly specific temporal and material setting does not serve as a mere retro backdrop or politically moot nod to the past, but rather works as a mnemonic and affective bridge that highlights a potential social critique of the present.

Powell notes that, for Deleuze and Guattari, artistic assemblages “ha[ve] nothing to do with ideology” as “ideologies are inevitably bound by the existing regimes of signification and representation in their milieu, and they replicate its structures. Art, meanwhile has nothing to do with signifying.”[x] It is the affective potentialities of art that interest Deleuze and Guattari, and Powell, respectively. Powell in Deleuze and Horror does not reject methodologies concerned more directly with discourse, power, and the political, but rather wishes to supplement them with schizoanalytic and materialist perspectives. Still, reading horror cinema solely through affective and materialist lens runs the risk of creating yet another formalist dogma divorced from wider cultural, political, and economic concerns. It would seem that such questions are especially pertinent in reference to horror cinema, a genre historically entangled with racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, and objectification of female bodies, to name just a few cringe-worthy misalliances. Focusing on the schizoanalytic mantra of “the brain is the screen”, to the exclusion of culturally mediated meanings and discursive responses, creates an artificial division of studies concerned with the political and those concerned with the affective. Barbara Kennedy, the author of Deleuze and the Cinema of Sensation, when discussing Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and its hyperviolent and highly stylized scenes of rape and murder, points to the risk of losing track of political implications of violence and its cinematic representations.[xi] For the very same reason, I remain sceptical about dismissing questions of representation and discursive analysis of cultural texts.[xii] My own approach benefits not only from feminist new materialist appreciation of intra-active entanglements and schizoanalysis, but also from feminist politics of location and more traditional perspectives developed in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist scholars of cinema and culture.

Dangerous Mermaids and Fragile Middle-classes

Even though The Lure only references two popular mermaid tropes directly: mythological sirens’ power to sway their male prey with their singing and Hans Christian Andersen’s rather gloomy and disheartening “The Little Mermaid,” one can follow other mermaids, other themes, other singularities as well. The act of following, as Deleuze and Guattari define it, belongs to the realm of nomadic rather than royal scientific procedures, and does away with the latter’s fixation on reproduction, deduction, and “the permanence of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced.”[xiii] To follow is then to search for “the ‘singularities’ of a matter, or rather of a material,” which in this case is Smoczyńska’s film and its mermaid themes.[xiv]

Tracing all the meanings accrued by the figure of a mermaid in Polish culture and arts exceeds the scope of this essay, but two themes deserve a closer look. The fact that the mermaid sisters decide to surface in Warsaw rather than at the seaside connects directly with the Mermaid of Warsaw, a half-woman, half-fish hybrid with a shield and raised sword, the city’s symbol dating back to 14^th century, included in its coat of arms, and present in its cityscape in manifold forms: street names, monuments, statues, bas-reliefs, neon lights, not to mention “syrenka” gadgets and memorabilia lurking in every tourist shop and museum in the capital.[xv] Interestingly, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw opened its doors in March 2017 with an inaugural exhibition devoted to the mythological siren and its “cultural connotations [as] Warsaw’s symbol, and its universality in the context of creating a modern urban identity.”[xvi] The exhibition title, “The Beguiling Siren is Thy Crest,” comes from a poem by one of Poland’s leading romantic poets, which points to another salient meaning of a mermaid as featured in the “uncanny Slavdom.” This term, theorized by a renowned scholar of Polish literature and culture, Maria Janion, stands for brutally repressed pre-Christian folk and pagan traditions hopelessly entangled with an unacknowledged guilt as an Eastern European colonizer.[xvii]

What one finds in Janion’s book is “a postcolonial Polish mentality [that] can be defined as a combination, or a vicious circle….of a sense of inferiority toward the [Latin, Christianized, civilized] west and of superiority toward the [pagan, uncivilized] east.”[xviii] This West/East split, as I argue later, has also been restructured along the classist city-countryside axis. Agata Pyzik in Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, also looks to Janion’s uncanny Slavdom for explanation behind the lack of coherent identity among Poles. Poland’s double-status as a country that was repeatedly colonized by multiple invaders, but which also acted as an active colonizer of Eastern European lands forms the crux of uncanny Slavdom. And while the colonized status has been enshrined in highly popular romantic notion of Poland as “the Christ of nations,” its colonizing position has been all but disavowed or turned into manic fantasies of Great Poland.[xix] The issues of power, guilt, martyrology, and in(ter)dependence are tightly connected with the spectral images of Poland as a triumphant, virulent, and revolutionary masculinity and as a desecrated, frail, and melancholic femininity. In this context, Golden and Silver play with such gendered visions of Poland and its people popularized during Polish Romanticism.[xx] While the two sisters bewitch Warsaw with their siren call, and colonize the desires of everyone they encounter, Silver is concurrently colonized by her own desire to become a human girl. As Janion skilfully argues, the Slavic presence resurfaced in Polish Romantics’ writing in the form of All Hallows’ Eve pagan rituals, the figures of dryads, rusalkas, and specters, dark and earthy magic, and the occult. From this perspective, the mermaids in The Lure mark a violent and inevitable return of brutal past, unresolved traumas, and undisclosed shame. They are outsiders because of their pre-Christian and nonhuman origins, and they point to the lie behind the myth of the Mermaid of Warsaw – they have come ashore to eat men rather than protect them. And even though the two sisters initially take to the city and its people, ultimately there is no place for them in this reality. They become an embarrassment, a broken instrument, an obsolete remnant of a past that promised so much but delivered so little.

A different take on the Polish mentality is offered by Andrzej Leder in his Prześniona Rewolucja: ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej (Over-dreamt Revolution: Exercises in Historical Logic), in which he formulates an interesting, if controversial, thesis about modern-day Polish middle-classes and their lack of cohesion and political self-awareness. Utilizing a psychoanalytic perspective, he argues that Poles “slept through” a two-part social revolution which took place between 1939 and 1956, the former being the Holocaust (and for all intents and purposes an annihilation of an emergent Jewish middle-class) and the latter being the elimination of aristocracy and landed gentry via nationalization and manumission carried out by communist regime in the first decade after the World War II. Because contemporary middle-classes refuse to acknowledge their forefathers’ and foremothers’ role in and moral responsibility for these purges, they remain caught between two phantasmatic (and phantasmagorical) pseudo-identities: a pre-war idyllic lifestyle of Polish landed gentry (whose power and economic stability rested on feudalism and de facto enslavement of peasants that continued well into late nineteenth century) and a borrowed Westernized (globalized) dream of consumerism and neoliberal market relationships. Leder locates the second stage of the emergence of Polish middle-class in the late 1980s and early 1990s transition era, where certain practices and habitual ways of thinking coalesced around a new modern Polish middle-class.[xxi]

This introduction to modern-day Polish identity is crucial if one is to understand one of the central motifs in Smoczyńska’s movie – the lure of a big urban metropolis and its effect on naïve, if dangerous, outsiders from the country. This uneasy relationship is played out through a song by Ballady i Romanse, “I came to the city,” which appears soon after the two sisters land a gig as backup singers and strippers at the dance hall, Adria. Since the official English translation smoothes out the ambiguities embedded in the lyrics I translated a few lines in a more direct, if less poetic, way. The musical number, probably the biggest and most difficult to stage in the whole film, chronicles the girls’ makeover.[xxii] The singer – Krysia – wearing a fur coat and elegant hat cuts through an unruly crowd waiting in a disorderly queue in front of the iconic Warsaw department store – Sezam.  The three enter brightly-lit, all-white space with two escalators (an icon of modernity associated with communist-era department stores) and shelves filled with Western products (though in a true PRL fashion the shelves are not all that full).[xxiii] A giddy collective dance number follows. Their playfulness is reminiscent of kids having fun in a big store, but being placed in a shopping cart also points to their status as yet another product. But by becoming a product, Golden and Silver also point to the fact that their newly-acquired urban identity rests on visual markers and as such this identity can be bought, stylized, and copied (successfully or unsuccessfully). After a compulsory catwalk scene, the mermaids are ready to take on Warsaw, symbolized by its most iconic communist-era architectural piece – the Palace of Culture and Science – a highly contested gift from the Soviets. Together with an all-girl school trip and dozens of teenagers, they drive to the top of the Palace to take in the view. Still, the view is not shown to the audience, and the camera focuses rather on the two girls, now happily joining in the song with Krysia and the dancing crowds. The happy song ends on a darker note when Silver faints after swirling too fast, while her dark-haired sister, Golden, takes over the lyrical focalization and ends the song with “Hands that got dirty doing dirty deeds / and their admiration / such a pity to look at.”

Throughout the song the city is presented consistently as a place which is full of mind-boggling smells and flavours, sites and objects such as neon lights, cars, pigeons, horns, potted plants, and escalators. But, most importantly, the city “will tell us what we lack,” as the chorus repeatedly explains over the sound of an ecstatic response: “YES-YES-YEESSS!” Still, the first couple of lines introduce confusing intentions and desires: “I came to the city / I wanted to present my best self / to change, change anything / to turn heads / she turned everything back.” The last two lines play on the verb “zwrócić,” which might mean both “to take something back,” “to return” but also “to vomit.” The following three lines present a stark contrast with the fantastic vision of the department store extravaganza and bright lights: “Wings cut by disgusting cadaver (of life itself) / I walk through the city / everywhere smog and pollution.” It would seem city life is not all neon lights and flower beds; urban makeover requires sacrifices, which foreshadows the film’s tragic ending.

The apparent tension between the sophisticated urbanites and the crude newcomers has been a hot topic for many years now in the Polish media. The derogatory names circulating both in the press and seeping into everyday language point at people who “do the urban living” wrong – they are called “słoiki” (jars) or “lemmingi” (lemmings), or in the context of Warsaw, “warszafka” (little Warsaw). Even though all three designations have emerged in different political and cultural contexts and apply to different imagined social groups, in each case certain lifestyles or habits are deemed unsatisfactory and excessive; all three groups are accused of failed mimicry, lower than average intelligence, and impropriety. In most cases it is suggested that their mistakes stem from being outsiders who ineptly pretend to be urbane and urban. Thus, the two mermaids singing “I came to the city / I wanted to present my best self” comments on how the newcomers are typecast by the city dwellers (who sometimes have spent only a few years more in the city than the urban neophytes). The commentary seems both naïve and ironic at the same time. The musical number exudes such unabashed joy (visually, aurally, tactilely) at discovering Sezam – the PRL temple of (limited) consumerism – that the viewers are caught in an affective tide of bright images, verbal and non-verbal nostalgia. A catchy pop melody triggers a kinaesthetic desire to dance with/to the song. And, finally, Polish viewers over the age of thirty are flooded with half-forgotten memories of never-ending queues, semi-religious visits to a department store, and a mandatory school trip to the Palace or simply to the capital. Still, the figure of a simple girl from the country, a stock character of so many vicious jokes in Poland’s memosphere, cannot be easily set aside, and the words “to change / to change anything / to turn heads” sound ironic and cruel, especially in the light of later events. The two ingénues, Silver and Golden, who truly are the epitome of the uncouth, ill-mannered, marginal Other invading the urban centre, represent different ways of adapting to the big city and its harsh lights. In the beginning, the two sisters relish the city’s jobs, clothes, cigarettes, vodka, music, and quirky individuals, but the moment they begin to look for something more (Silver for Mietek’s love and Golden for an independent life and their father’s acceptance), they realize the city’s offer is limited to the play of surfaces, cheap nylon, and incandescent lights. They are unwelcome disruption because their somewhat funny, somewhat sad attempts to mimic proper urban lifestyle actually reveal not only a performative nature of middle-classness, but also the fact that everyone is already involved in mimicking and copying other, supposedly more sophisticated (that is, Western) fashions and trends.[xxiv]

Terrific and Terrifying: The Horror and Nostalgia of the 1980s

On the one hand I find it striking that The Lure’s temporal setting went largely unnoticed by Western commentators. On the other, I am painfully aware that the Polish 1980s are usually read through the Solidarity movement, the Martial Law (1981-1983) as well as pervasive visual drabness and low-key melancholy perhaps captured best in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue (1989).  And yet, the so-called transition from communism to capitalism had already begun in the second half of the 1980s. Even before the political transformation of 1989 and the ensuing neoliberal shock therapy of the early 1990s took place, Western pop-cultural texts, selected economic practices, lifestyles, and fashions had been seeping into Polish reality via official and unofficial channels. The resulting mish-mash of old and new trends, competing ideas, peripheral and centric systems of signification (which were indistinguishable to an untrained post communist eye of the consumer) meant that the transition era was also a time symbolized by excess and cultural overcoding. That excess was marked specifically by the embarrassing (and embarrassed) subject who enacted capitalism or the West incorrectly and desperately tried to find a bearing in a rapidly changing reality.

But everyday life was more than meets the camera eye. Resting their eyes from a dull palette of mustard yellows and earthy browns associated with state-controlled public spaces (bars, trains, schools, buildings), women enjoyed joyous excess of sequins and neon hues, puffed-up perms, large shoulder pads, vivid eyeshadows, while men experimented with Miami Vice loose suits in light colours, polo shirts, New Romantic thin ties, mullets and carefully groomed facial hair. Pyzik argues that Western popular culture reached Poland only in the late 1980s, but because state-owned media favored high-brow production, Poles “didn’t have permissiveness for schlock.”[xxv] And because Poles did not have time and space to develop an ironic attitude towards low-brow entertainment and, as a consequence, took Western pop culture seriously and, to some extent, reverentially, they also lacked “postmodern easiness or ironic distance towards the schlock.”[xxvi] One could argue that Smoczyńska’s film with its frenzy of intensities (colours, lights, textiles, textures, synthesizers, voices) is not citing the 1980s from a safe (ironic) distance. In fact, The Lure manages to remain both very close to and quite far from the dance halls of the 1980s. Its intimate absorption in the past is revealed, for instance, in the first long shot of Adria where camera accompanies the club’s boss as the searches for the “fishy” smell and checks on his employees. The camera captures a series of familiar PRL stereotypes (oily pony-tailed bouncer, waiters in black-and-white tackling unruly customers, busy kitchen ladies and their hypersexualized supervisor), which in my own case has triggered a wave of rhizomatic conjunctions of screen-shots, photographs, scenes from the 1980s cultural texts as well as my own life. Still, at one point the camera forgets about its role of trailing the boss and instead lingers behind to get closer look at a woman dancing by herself in an almost empty room. The gesture disrupts the narrative focus and reminds the viewers of the camera’s line of flight away from structure in order to spy on the lithe dancer.

This nostalgic closeness becomes unbearable in the scenes set in the musicians’ two-room flat, in which three people and two mermaids live side by side crammed in spaces already besieged by ugly furniture, cheap knick-knacks, leopard print blankets, and dreary wallpaper. Still, as in any other film marked by postmodern nostalgia, the past looks a bit brighter, a bit more vivid, and simply more enticing than it actually was. In this sense, The Lure keeps its distance from the past. Underneath the glam, the frenzy, and the somewhat unfocused, glazed looks of all the human characters, the colours are still deep, the little details unnervingly on target, and the schlock both corn-fed (it is Eastern Europe, after all) and classy (Western) at the same time.

Pyzik reacts strongly against the contemporary boom for nostalgia of the East (sometimes called Ostalgie in German): retro-dining and vodka tours, rediscovery of 1960s-1980s music genres, renewed appreciation for socrealist architecture and art, newfound affinity for communist-era furniture, clothing, patterns, design, typography, etc. For Pyzik such nostalgic attachments are a way of reliving the trauma of the transition without openly addressing what really happened during the early 1990s. It is safer, according to her, to look back with nostalgia (or condemnation, sometimes both) at the communist regime rather than to analyze what happened during the implausibly brutal shock therapy of the early 1990s. More than that, she links nostalgia and aestheticization of the communist period with political passivity.[xxvii] Various iterations of this anti-nostalgia argumentation appear also in connection to highly successful Polish mainstream films that deal with actual historical figures: Wałęsa. Człowiek z nadziei (Andrzej Wajda, 2013), Bogowie (Łukasz Palkowski, 2014), and Sztuka Kochania (Maria Sadowska, 2017). The painstaking meticulous efforts to bring PRL back to life on screen (using specific types of potted plant, the right hue of wooden panelling, the use of yellow filter, etc.) unearth a material longing for PRL that effectively undercuts the discursively expressed condemnation of PRL political repression and brutality. However, in defence of nostalgia, Dominik Bartmanski argues that “[b]eyond idolizing, longing, missing or ironizing, there are other distinct modes of successful engagement with a failed past.”[xxviii] In other words, instead of reading nostalgia exclusively as a melancholic desire for a failed and irrevocably lost past, he sees the role of certain visual artefacts, architectural sites, and cultural practices as mnemonic bridges to the communist past and ways towards a potential, if not reconciliation, then understanding.

Patricia Pisters writes that the paradigm shift proposed by Deleuze for film studies moves “from considering cinema and the spectator as a ‘disembodied eye’ (defined by the look and the gaze, desire and identification) to considering cinema and the spectator as an embodied brain (defined by perception – even illusory ones –, selections – even random ones –, memories – even fake ones –, imaginations, suggestions and above all emotions as pure affect).”[xxix] The concept of an embodied brain offers a way to tackle discursive-material entanglements of The Lure and to move beyond conventional interpretations that focus on narrowly defined discursive elements (such as dialogue or plot). What is at stake is not simply adding “the material” to “the discursive” (as this sets up a false dichotomy and a non-existent boundary), but rather showing how the discursive is always already material and vice versa. For instance, the fishy smell, to which characters allude to a number of times, triggers olfactory sensations associated with marinated herring+pickles+vodka+cigarettes (which, sans the cigarettes, forms now a clichéd vignette resurrected in popular vodka bars mushrooming in Eastern European cities). Half-forgotten, half-fabricated memories of late-night celebrations of countless name days from my early childhood swing gently between pleasantness and unpleasantness, joy and anxiety, and as such, mirror the nostalgic trajectory explored in The Lure.

One could ask, then,  what role The Lure’s horrific elements play. Do they exclusively serve as a vehicle for the monstrous feminine, fear of pollution associated with young women’s sexuality, and the spectre of vampiric lesbianism that threatens to destabilize patriarchal system of signification? Or can they be understood differently as well? I would like to argue that the horror of The Lure resides not only in the mermaids’ inhuman (and feminine) monstrosity, but also in the film’s relationship to the past it imagines and the human (and non-human) interactions it shows. In this sense, Smoczyńska’s movie taps into a vision of the social horrific reminiscent of Piotr Szulkin’s 1980s SF cinema, in which he employed typical SF tropes such as an alien invasion and post apocalyptic themes.[xxx] Despite their official SF generic affiliations, Szulkin’s low-budget movies (The War of the World: Next Century, 1981; O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization, 1985; Ga, Ga – Glory to the Heroes, 1986) are often remembered as the horror cinema of the 1980s, as they locate the horrific in everyday malice and in human penchant for sadism, boiling underneath the surface and just waiting to burst through the thin veneer of sociality and sociability. The horror of social relations is also mentioned by Pyzik, who comments on the perceived unfriendliness and brusqueness of Poles, often noted by outsiders.[xxxi] Poles do not smile; they are intolerant, mistrustful, and unwilling to help each other, but they are more than happy to engage in aggressive verbal and physical altercations. It is unclear whether Pyzik tries to trace the origins of these stereotypes or treats the supposed Polish hardness as a fact in need of deconstruction. Arguably, she manages the former, but not the latter.[xxxii] Still, if taken as a telling stereotype, boorishness and cruelty, often associated with the so-called hardening of Poles under the communist regime, reveals itself not only in the violent resolution of Golden and Silver’s encounter with the city, but also in the myriad little indignities suffered by the characters and their brusque exchanges, which culminate in the musicians’ family mêlée.

When the family begin to suspect that the mermaids might be behind a ghastly murder, they try to get rid of them by knocking them unconscious, wrapping their bodies in carpets, and, finally, throwing them into the Vistula river. What follows is one of the film’s most horrific scenes in which the mother, father, and son fight wildly and uncontrollably in their tiny flat. Stripped to their underwear, they seem drunk on violence and self-hatred. When it is over, their flat resembles a war zone, while their sprawling, black and blue bodies seem dead. It is hard to say whether the violent outburst is caused by guilt or maybe represents a belated reaction to the mermaids, or a curse-like madness bestowed by the two sisters. In a dream-like sequence, another singer comes to their flat with a drip feed to bring them back to life. This image brings to mind associations with hospital recovery, but in the context of dozens of vodka bottles strewn around the flat, the “glucose” drip feed (as the song lyrics clarify) is also reminiscent of a detoxification centre (a staple of the uphill battle against alcoholism of the communist-era).

The eruption of familial violence could be linked to sisters’ uncanny sexuality. In an earlier scene, Krysia has a dream-like erotic fantasy while having sex with her husband – the drummer. She imagines herself as a sleek, dark-tailed mermaid mother with the two little mermaids suckling her breasts. Immediately on waking up from this half-dream she projects her own shameful desires onto her husband, angrily accusing him of smelling like a fish. The ridiculous exchange triggers several associations with the fishy smell: the mermaids and the spectre of their erotic irresistibility; the allegedly fish-like smell of female genitals, which would point to the drummer’s all-too-human infidelity; and, last but not least, the ubiquitous marinated herring, which ironically is also the husband’s official line of defence. This short scene is just one of many in which the two mermaids’ presence destabilizes the family’s (and the city’s) volatile organization of eroticism, desire, and sex. And yet, the mermaids might have disrupted more than just sexual desire; they also force the characters to confront the failed mimicry of their pseudo-successful, fake-Western existence in Adria, which they usually drown in alcohol.[xxxiii]

The mermaids may also stand for the brutality of the communist regime, which metaphorically rips people’s hearts (souls?) out, chews and spits them out. This becomes clear in the film noir subplot, where a female militia officer is hunting Golden. In one scene the whole family and the two mermaids are gathered watching television in one of the few images of domestic happiness. What starts as a comedic interlude – the drummer has requested a song for his wife (“Chronos” by Chase) on a listeners’ choice program and goes on to dance for her and even attempts a semi-serious striptease – quickly devolves into a tense quarrel. The drummer’s serenade is interrupted by a popular criminal chronicle, Magazyn Kryminalny 997, which recounts the grisly murder committed at the Vistula river and in which the female lieutenant, now dressed in her official MO uniform, implores viewers to come forward with any information pertaining to the crime. Interestingly, for 24 years the opening titles of Magazyn Kryminalny 997 used the very same song that the drummer requested for his wife, which crafts an interesting intratextual link, reminding the audience how quickly meanings could be and were switched in the PRL – from a love song to criminal chronicle, from domestic bliss to domestic violence, from desire to fear of outsiders.

Conclusion

The manifold desires populating The Lure come in all materials and colours: on one hand, ardent reds and bright yellows, blonde wigs and white suits connect with the images of the affluent West, city nightlife and triumph; on the other, greenish blue, dark and fluorescent turquoise recall murky waters of the swimming pool, Adria’s backstage, and the Vistula river. The latter hues are associated with the mermaids, as in their first solo number, which is more harsh punk than soft rock of Figs ‘N’ Dates. Singing their dark and violent song about “vicious love” and “black magic,” they are wearing fauxhawks, copious amount of black kohl, and matching black sequin mini-dresses with scaly high shoulder pads reminiscent of New Wave futurism, while Adria’s crazed audience is throwing money and red carnations at them. Though the patrons of Adria throwing banknotes triggers associations with the West and female performers in night clubs, red carnation is the quintessential communist flower – given to both men and women for official and nonofficial celebrations of all kinds. The marriage of West and East is fleeting, however, and the short-lived success quickly turns sour as Golden is rejected by her father and Silver fails to become a sexually available girl for Mietek.

The above-mentioned Adria scene encapsulates perfectly the relationship between stratified layers of social formations and the emerging BwO, to return to Deleuze and Guattari’s nomenclature. The intensities released through the angry play of lights, sounds, words, pop-cultural associations, gestures, and movements speak to the two sisters’ unbridled desires that struggle against the stratum represented by Adria, its patrons, and the musicians. The sisters come close to a total unraveling, a complete deterritorialization through the musical frenzy, but somehow manage to stay in control, within the stratum, and to explore all the possibilities it offers, potential lines of flight (punk rock, New Wave aesthetics, incestuous doubling of female desire, etc.), and new conjunctions of desiring machines that are formed against all expectations, logic even.

The embodied brain that emerges in the event of watching The Lure does not have to be bound by “the maudlin, even morbid, desire of psychoanalysis… doomed to dream forever of recovering the ideal object that is has lost” but rather may look forward to new interrelationships which have not yet been formed, which do not yet exist.[xxxiv] This orientation towards the future yet to come opens up new avenues of understanding, not necessarily based solely on reading and deciphering deep structures of cinematic language. Paradoxically, in this essay the orientation towards the future (rather than the past) stands for the communist past, which remains under-theorized, misplaced, and brushed aside, or, alternatively, squeezed into majoritarian narrations of Solidarity, wartime heroics, and Komuna (a derogative term for both communist regime and communist era). Instead of focusing on an ahistorical conceptual framework of the monstrous feminine, I have opted to look at The Lure politically and socially, but through “le politique” of ordinary lives. In this I have joined the notion of an embodied brain with that of a situated brain, which combines freely the material-discursive singularities with affective states, and context- and time-specific references.[xxxv] I hope to have shown that The Lure’s generic hybridity and its emphasis on the sensual rather than the cerebral and its highly synaesthetic form do not obscure or hinder a potential political analysis, but may, in fact, become the film’s main vehicle for social and political commentary.

[i] Agnieszka Smoczyńska, “The Lure: An Introduction,” SeeThroughFlicks Youtube channel, 1:57, 2 January, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI2UHxMPk4I

[ii] See, for instance, Justin Lowe for The Hollywood Reporter, David Ehrlick for Indiewire.com, Matt Goldberg for Collider.com, Simon Abrams for RogerEbert.com, Guy Lodge for Variety. Lodge’s final comment is the closest any of the reviewers get to the notion of the political: “Whether the 1980s period trappings are merely there for their own substantial kitsch value, or whether a degree of political subtext is present in these shenanigans, is among a number of questions left unanswered in the surf.”

[iii] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 268-269.

[iv] Anna Powell, “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space: Mixing the Planes in Hellboy,” in Deleuze and Film, ed. David Martin-Jones and William Brown (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 174.

[v] Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 58.

[vi] It is worth noting here that these do not constitute three separate types, but rather point to certain forms of organization which at any given moment may gain ascendancy over the other two. See also “Introduction: Rhizome” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia II: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 [c.1980]), 1-28.

[vii] Powell, “The Daemons,” 176.

[viii] Ibid., 179.

[ix] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 185.

[x] Powell, “The Daemons,” 185.

[xi] Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 182.

[xii] See, for instance, Rebecca Coleman, “Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation, Materiality and Intensive Time,” Women: A Cultural Review 25, nb.1 (2014): 27-45.

[xiii] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 433.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Another popular image associated with the mermaid is the Syrena, a Polish car manufactured between 1957 and 1972; a widely popular, if perennially faulty automobile became one of the symbols of the fall of communism, when in the early 1990s thousands of Syrenkas (as Poles lovingly called them) were abandoned and even set on fire. See also, Olga Drenda, Duchologia polska: rzeczy i ludzie w latach transformacji (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Karakter, 2016), 39.

[xvi] Though both siren and mermaid are translated into “syrena” in Polish, the two creatures are not necessarily synonymous. The siren is a wider category which includes half-woman and half-bird or half-dragon creatures, not necessarily only half-woman and half-fish. See also museum’s website: http://artmuseum.pl/en/wystawy/syrena-herbem-twym-zwodnicza

[xvii] Maria Janion, Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: fantazmaty literatury. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006.

[xviii] Elżbieta Ostrowska, “Desiring the Other: The Ambivalent Polish Self in Novel and Film.” Slavic Review 70, nb. 3 (September 2011): 503.

[xix] The name comes from the seminal work of the most famous Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz – Dziady, Part III (1832).

[xx] Yet another surprising connection to Polish Romanticism comes in the form of Ballady i Romanse, sister music duo who composed the soundtrack for The Lure and who appear briefly as wedding singers in the last part of the movie. Ballady i Romanse (Ballads and Romances) is the title of Mickiewicz’s collection of romantic ballads, which features a number of Slavic supernatural elements and is sometimes cited as Polish Romanticism manifesto. The name of the band, however, comes from a communist era poet (Władysław Broniewski) who took Mickiewicz’s work and remade it after his own fashion to offer a merciless retelling of the original ballad, this time set during the World War II and concerning little Jewish girl’s execution by the SS.

[xxi] The book was met with both lavish applause and sharp criticism. Jan Sowa, in his review for Le Monde Diplomatique Polska rightly points out a confusion of terms employed by Leder: his concepts of “middle-class”, “bourgeoisie”, and “urbanites” are ill-defined, which weakens his overall thesis. See also Jan Sowa, Review of Prześniona rewolucja: ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej by Andrzej Leder, Le Monde Diplomatique Polska 06/100 (June 2014), http://monde-diplomatique.pl/LMD100/index.php?id=1_5

[xxii] Adria’s boss, “Pan Kierownik” (Mr. Manager – a popular appellation used during communist era to refer to men managing all kinds of public spaces, offices, institutions, etc.) tells the singer to get some human clothes for the two naked mermaids. In Polish language his order has a two-fold implication: the two sisters not only lack proper human attire but they also do not look proper, that is just like young urban girls should.

[xxiii] Polska Republika Ludowa (PRL), or The Polish People’s Republic, covers the period between 1952 and 1990. Following a brief period of economic stability and relative prosperity of the 1970s, the 1980s saw a gradual collapse of the communist regime. Today, the 1980s are still remembered mostly via images of empty shop shelves, martial law (1981-1983), the rise of Solidarity movement, and a slow embrace of Western goods, lifestyles, and culture.

[xxiv] See also Magda Szcześniak, Normy widzialności: tożsamość w czasach transformacji. Warszawa: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana: Instytut Kultury Polskiej. Wydział Polonistyki. Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2016.

[xxv] Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Zero Books: 2014),

136.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Pyzik, Poor but Sexy, 7.

[xxviii] Dominik Bartmanski, “Successful Icons of Failed Time: Rethinking Post-communist Nostalgia,” Acta Sociologica 54, nb. 3 (2011): 227.

[xxix] Patricia Pisters, “Delirium Cinema or Machines of the Invisible?” in Deleuze and the

Schizoanalysis of Cinema, ed. Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (London: Continuum, 2008), 114.

[xxx] I have purposefully avoided discussing Polish horror cinema, which arguably consists of a handful of titles that could be roughly divided into two categories: high-brow psychological dramas and low-brow campy productions of the 1980s. And it is still too early to say if Smoczyńska’s The Lure and Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) might signal a new wave of horror cinema in Poland.

[xxxi] Pyzik, Poor but Sexy, 58.

[xxxii] Pyzik addresses three typical explanations: historical serfdom, communist regime, and neoliberal shock therapy that left people deeply scarred.

[xxxiii] For more on the concept of mimicry applied in postcolonial studies see also Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28 (Spring, 1984): 125-133.

[xxxiv] Nick Mansfield, Subjectivities, Theories of the Self, From Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 142-143

[xxxv] I would like to thank Anna Kurowicka for the concept of a “situated brain.”

Notes on Contributor

Agnieszka Kotwasińska, PhD, is a cultural studies researcher and has graduated from the Institute of English Studies and American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. In her doctoral thesis she looked at the transformations of kinship in contemporary horror fiction by American women writers. Since 2012 she has been an adjunct at American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, where she offers courses in genre fiction, horror cinema, and new media. In her research she concentrates on the canonization processes in literature and cinema, embodiment in the so-called low genres, and the reproduction of death in horror texts.

Bibliography

Bartmanski, Dominik. “Successful Icons of Failed Time: Rethinking Post-communist Nostalgia.” Acta Sociologica 54, nb. 3 (2011): 213-231.

Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis 28 (Spring, 1984): 125-133.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Coleman, Rebecca. “Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation, Materiality and

Intensive Time.” Women: A Cultural Review 25, nb.1 (2014): 27-45.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II: Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Continuum, 1989 [c.1985].

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II: A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 [c.1980].

Drenda, Olga. Duchologia polska: rzeczy i ludzie w latach transformacji. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Karakter, 2016.

Janion, Maria. Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: fantazmaty literatury. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006.

Kennedy, Barbara M. Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

Leder, Andrzej. Prześniona Rewolucja: ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014.

Lodge, Guy. Review of The Lure by Agnieszka Smoczyńska. Variety.com. 7 March 2016. Accessed 10 February, 2017. http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/the-lure-review-1201722757/

Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivities, Theories of the Self, From Freud to Haraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Ostrowska, Elżbieta. “Desiring the Other: The Ambivalent Polish Self in Novel and Film.” Slavic Review 70, nb. 3 (September 2011): 503-523.

Powell, Anna. “The Daemons of Unplumbed Space: Mixing the Planes in Hellboy.” In Deleuze and Film. Edited by David Martin-Jones and William Brown, 173-191. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Powell, Anna. Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Pisters, Patricia. “Delirium Cinema or Machines of the Invisible?” In Deleuze and the

Schizoanalysis of Cinema. Edited by Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack, 102-115. London: Continuum, 2008.

Pyzik, Agata. Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West. Zero Books: 2014. Kindle.

Smoczyńska, Agnieszka. “The Lure: An Introduction.” SeeThroughFlicks Youtube channel, 1:57. 2 January, 2016. Accessed 10 February, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI2UHxMPk4I

Sowa, Jan. Review of Prześniona rewolucja: ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej by Andrzej Leder. Le Monde Diplomatique Polska 06/100 (June 2014). Accessed 10 February 2017. http://monde-diplomatique.pl/LMD100/index.php?id=1_5

Szcześniak, Magda. Normy widzialności: tożsamość w czasach transformacji. Warszawa: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana: Instytut Kultury Polskiej. Wydział Polonistyki. Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2016.

Filmography

Aftermath (Pokłosie). Directed by Władysław Pasikowski. 2012. Monolith, 2013. DVD.

The Art of Loving. Michalina Wislocka’s Story (Sztuka Kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej). Directed by Maria Sadowska. Next Film. 2017.

The Collector (Komornik). Directed by Feliks Falk. 2005. Tim, 2006. DVD.

The Decalogue (Dekalog). Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. 1989. Criterion Collection, 2016. Blu-ray.

Demon. Directed by Marcin Wrona. 2015. Kino Świat. 2017. DVD.

The Lure (Córki Dansingu). Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska. 2015. Kino Świat, 2016. DVD.

Ga, Ga – Glory to the Heroes (Ga, ga: Chwala bohaterom). Directed by Piotr Szulkin. 1986. Filmostrada. DVD.

Gods (Bogowie). Directed by Łukasz Palkowski. 2014. Agora, 2014. DVD.

Ida. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski. 2013. Artificial Eye, 2014. DVD.

O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (O-Bi, O-Ba. Koniec cywilizacji). Directed by Piotr Szulkin. 1985. SPI. DVD.

Spoor (Pokot). Directed by Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik. 2017. Next Film.

Walesa – Man of Hope (Wałęsa. Człowiek z nadziei). Directed by Andrzej Wajda. 2013. Metrodome. 2014. DVD.

The War of the World: Next Century (Wojna światów). Directed by Piotr Szulkin. 1981. SPI. DVD.

I’m sorry, my son, I didn’t want to have to do this to you. But you can’t leave, not yet.

There is so much yet for you to witness.

– Father Martin Archimbaud in Outlast

The opening of Red Barrels’ 2013 title Outlast establishes a classic horror atmosphere: after receiving a mysterious letter, the game’s protagonist is called to a remote location in search of answers on its horrifying reputation. Wielding little else but a camcorder, Outlast allows the player to star in their own found footage film, borrowing from the now familiar aesthetic of the form. Yet in a videogame, the ability to interact with the game changes the dynamic between footage and viewer. Rather than watching old material recovered from the asylum, Outlast offers an experience akin to the ‘making of’ of a found footage film, where the protagonist is creating the record of his experiences as the game is played. Using the Outlast franchise as the central case study, my aim here is to examine the status of the game as a found footage artefact in relation to theoretical work on the same phenomenon in film. This includes a discussion of the implications of this sub-genre for its audiences, and by extension, the possible impact of Outlast and its plot on the player. Casting the player as the creator of what I term ‘footage-yet-to-be-found’, the game changes the familiar dynamic of found footage films and poses wider questions about player agency, the potential of interactive horror, and the blurring of multiple media forms as videogames and cinema continue to move closer together.

Although it is widely acknowledged that the interactive nature of videogames creates an experience that is different to film, games do often make use of cinematic devices, and it is easy to see that connections exist between the technologies and strategies employed by cinema and videogames. Many games use cut-scenes and in-game videos as part of their narrative, alongside the interactive sections, and there is evidence of a direct and knowing borrowing between the two media. An obvious example of this are adaptations from game to screen (such as Tomb Raider (2001), DOOM (2005) and Assassin’s Creed (2016)) or the creation of game titles as movie tie-ins (such as the LEGO games which have adopted franchises such as Harry Potter (2010-2011) and Lord of the Rings (2012)). Not just residing in cut-scenes and adaptations, these crossovers are becoming more elaborate, with Hollywood actors taking starring roles in games. Recent high profile titles such as Beyond: Two Souls (Quantic Dream, 2013) and both Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Activision, 2014) and Infinite Warfare (Activision, 2016) have used actors Willem Dafoe, Ellen Page, Kevin Spacey and Kit Harrington to portray in-game characters. Similarly, auteur-developer Hideo Kojima, best known for the Metal Gear Solid series (Konami, 1987-2015), has stated that “games, novels and films will merge into one type of entertainment”, because “the time you have to choose what media or entertainment you experience is dwindling. More and more people are looking at types of media that combine elements together” [1]. With Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro featuring prominently in the trailers for Kojima’s new project Death Stranding, it seems the developer has already taken the first steps in this direction.

Yet the connection between the two forms runs deeper than adaptation and acting: games often borrow visual styles and techniques from the big screen, employing elements of genre and iconography to draw players into their worlds. Representations of action, science fiction, and even film noir have found their way from the cinema to the console, bringing with them familiar imagery and settings. The horror genre has seen a similar fate, with its old castles, dark cemeteries and seminal monsters quickly finding a place in gaming. However, it is not simply plots and settings which have made their way from the big to the small screen, and certain games embrace a particular aesthetic: the slasher horror tropes of Until Dawn (2015) and the zombie infestations of games such as Left 4 Dead (2008 and 2009) and Dead Rising (2006-2017) offer players an opportunity to engage more fully with the cinematic conventions they have become familiar with. Another example of this is the Outlast franchise, which draws on the aesthetics of the found footage horror film to deliver its narrative terrors.

I start feeling sick just looking at this place 

At the time of writing, the Outlast franchise, produced by independent Canadian developer Red Barrels, consists of two main games, titled Outlast (2013) and Outlast II (2017), as well as the downloadable content Whistleblower (2014), which serves as a companion piece to the original game. Although the plots and protagonist differ for each entry, they share certain characteristics, and the framing of the main character as a journalist and investigator, combined with the use of a camcorder as a core gameplay mechanic, allow for a particular reading of the games. Before offering such an analysis, I will briefly outline the plot and the role of the camera in each game.

In the original Outlast, players take on the role of Miles Upshur, investigative journalist, who receives an anonymous email outlining the questionable goings-on in the Mount Massive Asylum. Upshur travels to the facility to investigate, and as he makes his way through wards, cell blocks and sewers, he bears witness to the results of the horrific experiments conducted by the Murkoff Corporation. Led by doctor Wernicke, a German scientist enlisted by the United States after the Second World War, the Murkoff Corporation attempted to advance Project Walrider. A strange combination of the supernatural and the technological, Walrider uses dream therapy and human hosts to create a biotechnological swarm of nanites. Ultimately, this single malevolent entity finds a new host in Upshur himself.

The immediate follow-up to Outlast, Whistleblower, features Waylon Park as its protagonist. The game opens as Park is sending an anonymous email, the same email received by Upshur in the main game. A software engineer working at Mount Massive for the Murkoff Corporation, Park tries to blow the whistle on the activities inside the asylum, but upon being discovered, he is volunteered as a subject to the experiments. Whistleblower frames Outlast in interesting ways, providing prequel, background and additional closure to the events of the main game. It uses similar mechanics to its predecessor, giving Park access to a camera early on. Unlike Upshur, however, Park escapes the asylum and is able to upload the videos onto a website called VIRALeaks. He managed to get out of Mount Massive, and so has his footage.

In Outlast II, the focus shifts from the confines of a mental institution to the sprawling Sonoran desert. Blake Langermann, assistant and cameraman to his journalist wife Lynn, has travelled to Arizona with her to investigate the death of a young woman. When their helicopter crashes, Langermann loses track of Lynn and sets out to find her. In his way are both the inhabitants of a small village, hidden away from civilization and inhabited by a strange religious cult, and memories of his troubled past and the death of Jessica, a childhood friend of his and Lynn’s. Although there is no direct link with either protagonist or location, Outlast II takes place in the same universe as the first game, and the sequel includes numerous hints that point to the Murkoff Corporation, the Walrider experiments, and their influence on the region and its inhabitants, including Langermann. 

In each of these scenarios of torture, insanity and death, the importance of the camera quickly becomes apparent, offering players a tool to (seemingly) record their in-game actions. The camera becomes an integral part of the game experience. In Outlast and Whistleblower, the camcorder includes a zoom function and night vision. Key events are recorded in the form of hand-written notes, saved to the player’s in-game journal, but there is no way to review the footage. Outlast II features a more advanced camera, keeping zoom and night vision, as well as adding a microphone function, which allows players to hear nearby enemies. The notes are replaced by recordings: using the footage shot by the player, these are saved to the journal and accompanied by voice-over commentary from Langermann.

Rather than a gimmick or narrative device, the camcorder and in particular its night vision capabilities are integral to the gameplay. Each instalment of the franchise informs its players that they are not fighters, and that their options are to run, hide, or die. The camera’s features enable players to navigate dark corridors and paths in an attempt to escape. In addition to its necessity for traversing the game space, the camera allows players a certain level of authorship and players are given the freedom to act as if they are recording events for some future audience. Each feature of the camera is explained early on and certain lulls in the gameplay allow for the careful selection and framing of shots. Whenever the camera is in use, its interface is in view, indicating battery power, level of zoom, framerate, and recording light, constantly reminding the player of the presence and function of the device. Although the footage that is recorded in both Outlast and Whistleblower is not accessible in any meaningful way outside of the direct experience of playing the game, the process of recording is deeply embedded. In Outlast, the opening text stresses to “stay alive as long as you can, record everything” [2]. Similarly, Park’s first note in Whistleblower states that he hopes the camera is found with his corpse, so that “the evidence on it does what I couldn’t, expose the truth” [3]. By contrast, the use of actual gameplay footage for its recordings in Outlast II further enforces the notion of authorship and creation. These features link the games to the aesthetics of found footage horror, not simply borrowing its style, but also the framing and the way in which they position their creation and audience. In order to fully explore this relationship, it will be necessary to discuss the form and its implications before returning to a more detailed analysis of the videogames. 

Maybe it was a glitch in the camera. Or maybe this place getting to me. 

Found footage was defined by Scott Meslow as being “built on the conceit that the movie was filmed not by a traditional, omniscient director, but by a character that exists within the film’s world – and whose footage was discovered some time after the events of the film” [4]. Heller-Nicholas similarly notes that “[f]ound footage horror films rely on the fictional premise that the footage from which they are constructed existed previously, and has been reutilized into a new, separate work” [5], and finally, Aldana Reyes focuses on editing and visual treatment: “Generally speaking, in found footage horror we watch a recording that has been discovered by someone else, who remains almost always unmentioned, and has been edited for ease of consumption. On the other hand, the images must look rawer and less edited than those of a mainstream film” [6]. What follows from these definitions is that found footage does not solely rely on its content, but rather draws on framing and cinematography, as well as the intervention of an unseen editor, to convey its narrative. The function of these framing devices is clear, namely to convince its audience that the recorded events have indeed occurred: “The formal construction of these films encourages a sense of verisimilitude and suggests that what is being shown is raw, unprocessed “reality”” [7]. Most commonly, they are presented as “either an un/official governmental record, a tape or digital file that plays as it would on someone’s camera, phone or computer which had been left behind or unattended, or as a home video taken home and then rewound and played” [8]. This emphasis on the supposed reality of the footage creates a greater proximity to its viewer and thus a more terrifying experience. As McRobert argues, found footage films contain “the implication that the filmic world is the same as the audience’s” [9], creating a situation where “the audience is not there, instead the filmic horror is potentially here” [10]. The fictional world that is recorded is close to the real world, and may not be so fictional, after all.

In addition to the use of narrative framing, the cinematic style of found footage horror equally offers audiences a chance to get up-close and personal. The size of the cast is small, often exceeding no more than four principal actors, and they themselves are in charge of the recording. The omniscient director is removed; instead, characters film whatever occurs and whatever their attention is drawn by, their raw footage joined by unedited commentary and physical responses to the events. This first person viewpoint can create a more direct connection between character and viewer, positioning the latter as if they were present and reacting alongside the cast, thus allowing “[f]ound footage horror [to] exploit its peculiar aesthetics to bolster this corporeal interaction, for example by including damaged stock that simulates the effects of external attacks on the camera holder or the recording apparel” [11]. Not only are the film’s characters placed alongside the audience, but so is their fate: when they are attacked, so, by extension, is the viewer. Interestingly, this proximity to the viewer simultaneously draws them in and frustrates them, as Heller-Nicholas discusses:

Implied in the camera’s presence here is a frustrating of visual control. Rather than acting as a surrogate eye that does our seeing for us, the camera obscures our vision, and stands between our eye and the things we wish to see. Additionally, we often want to look in places that the camera refuses to go. There is a mechanical slowing down that suggests a lack of agency working in direct opposition to the supposed sense of autonomy that a free-moving hand-held camera implies. [12]

Similarly, Bordwell notes the camera ubiquity present in most fiction films, a position which is clearly altered by the use of a single handheld camera [13], and Heller-Nicholas describes the camera as being “deliberately and consistently exposed as faulty”, affording found footage the ability “to undermine the dominant and often sadistic supremacy of the gaze by exposing this inadequacy to fully see” [14]. Viewer alignment is the reason behind these choices, as Aldana Reyes explains:

Found footage imposes natural limitations on the field of vision, especially if images are shot at eye or shoulder level […]  Given that found footage aims to strengthen the artificial alignment between vision/body of the film and vision/body of the viewer via the camera holder, a restricted visual field potentially makes that link more organic. [15]

By filming in this way, the cameraman becomes essentially invisible to the viewer and forces them into a first person viewpoint, bringing them closer to what is being filmed and the process of filming. This creates an interesting tension within found footage: on the one hand, there is the conceit of reality. The footage has been recovered; it is raw, organic, close to the audience’s responses, yet on the other hand, it is an experience which is tightly controlled, both by the intervention of an unknown editor, and through frustrating the view due to the quality and movement of the camera. Found footage signifies a lack of control, both on the part of the filmmaker and of the viewer. Arguably, this puts the form at odds with the player agency within a videogame as it is the notion of interactivity which is seen as the defining distinction between games and cinema. In order to explain this tension, I will return to a discussion of the two media.

…I’m going to be a witness… 

I have discussed the intersections between cinema and videogames, positioning Outlast as an example of found footage form. More needs to be said, however, in relation to what is arguably the distinction between cinema and games: the interactivity of the latter form. These ideas are the focus of the 2009 essay “Movie-Games and Game-Movies” by Douglas Brown and Tanya Krzywinska. The authors start by noting the similarities between the two media, stating that: “Like film, digital games are screen-based, and as such utilize many cinematic features, providing thereby one of the more basic and formal reasons for the increasing numbers of movie-game tie-ins” [16]. Indeed, the non-interactive cut scenes contained within most games “often utilize multiple points of view and editing, generally in the service of establishing place of situation” [17]. Yet the relationship is not simply a one-to-one comparison:

Digital games often employ aspects of cinema to make more meaningful and lend resonance to the activities undertaken by players in a game, yet what defines games generally, distinguishing them from other media, is that a game has to be played. This necessarily involves the player in making choices that affect in some way the state of the game and that the game responds to those choices. [18]

Due to this emphasis on interactivity and player agency, the cinematic dimensions of games operate differently than in film. Brown and Krzywinska note that “the camera is […] controlled by the player” and indeed that “[i]n many first and third person games that take place in a realized world across a range of platforms and game types, point-of-view and framing are anchored directly to the character whom the player controls” [19]. As a result, the ability of a director to carefully frame and compose shots is compromised. Cinematography is one of the core tools available to cinema to construct both narrative and affect. Although editing is of importance during scripted cut-scenes in videogames, for most of its duration, it is the player who is in control of the character and indeed the camera, diminishing the role of cinematography. This dichotomy raises interesting questions in relation to the case study: if the viewing of found footage removes control by frustrating the ubiquity of the camera, how can this be translated to an interactive experience, where the player is very much in control? The Outlast franchise manages to mitigate this contradiction, imitating the cinematic control and intended affect whilst allowing players the freedom to become the creators of their own found footage film.

Equally, the relationship between horror and interactivity is more complicated than in most videogame genres. Although gameplay is still key to the experience, this tends to focus on exploration and the discovery of terrifying events, often emphasizing narrative over player action. In her essay “Hands-On Horror”, Tanya Krzywinska explores this approach and its benefits for the genre. She reiterates the idea of games as interactive, stating that “games place a strong emphasis on the act of doing that extends beyond the kinetic and emotional responses that are common in cinema” [20]. However, Krzywinska notes, this process of doing is not present throughout the entirety of the game: “In each game there are periods in which the player is in control of gameplay and at others not, creating a dynamic rhythm between self-determination and pre-determination” [21]. She notes the importance of this ebb and flow in horror games as “in these particular games it takes on a generically apposite resonance […] because it ties into and consolidates formally a theme often found in horror in which supernatural forces act on, and regularly threaten, the sphere of human agency” [22]. The character in the game, and indeed the player, is out of control because of the antagonist(s) they are dealing with. Although all games include elements which promote or limit player agency, Krzywinska argues that in the case of horror games, “[t]hroughout the game, the effects of a higher power are always in evidence, [and] horror-based videogames are strongly dependent on their capacity to allow players to experience a dynamic between states of being in control and out of control” [23]. The reason for this is related to the supernatural forces as “[t]he operation of the game’s infrastructure invokes for the player an experience of being subject to a pre-determined, extrinsic, and thereby, Othered force, which is balanced against the promise of player autonomy offered by the game’s interactive dimension” [24]. It is not the game or its designer which frustrates the player’s control, but rather a malevolent outside agent who influences their progress throughout the game. Where found footage films appear to remove the agency of both filmmaker and viewer, the Outlast franchise uses the rhythm described by Krzywinska to position and affect its players. 

Whoever finds my corpse – trust no one and tell everyone 

As evidenced in a discussion of the original game by Phillipe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels, these tensions between being in and out of control were part of the discussion throughout the game’s development. In an insightful post to the Gamasutra website, Morin charts the origin story of the game and the decisions made by the team in creating the title: “Out [sic] first debate was about the core gameplay. We wavered between a Resident Evil-style approach to guns, but with very limited ammo, and a no-combat-at-all, Amnesia-style approach. We decided to go with no combat because it would allow us to build a more focused experience” [25]. This vision of a combat-less experience defined a lot of the design process. Morin explains:

Having decided that we would use “night vision,” we needed a protagonist that required it. We considered a member of some kind of SWAT team with night vision gear, but we wanted to sell the “no combat” concept, so we dropped any kind of law enforcement characters. At the time, a lot of movies were using the found footage concept, so we thought, “why not games?” Camcorders also have night vision, so it fit nicely. [26]

This led to the creation of the protagonist of the first game and his role within it: “After more brainstorming, we hit on the idea of a reporter. A reporter doesn’t usually have combat skills, and has a good reason to be carrying a camcorder, particularly if he’s in the course of doing an investigation” [27]. It was these ideas that informed the original game, as well as the downloadable content and the sequel. Red Barrels have cast the players as a specific protagonist, with abilities to match, and Outlast clearly frames their position within the game in its introductory text: 

You are Miles Upshur, an investigative reporter whose ambition is about to earn him an intimate tour of hell on earth. Always willing to dig into the stories no other journalist would dare investigate, you will seek out the dark secret at the heart of Mount Massive Asylum. Stay alive as long as you can; record everything. You are not a fighter; to navigate the horrors of Mount Massive and expose the truth, your only choices are to run, hide, or die. [28]

This initial text is interesting for numerous reasons. Although the game employs first person perspective throughout, players are given a name and some background as to who they are within this world. It also frames their experience and behaviours in a particular way: as an investigative journalist, they are here to “seek out the dark secret” in the asylum location. In doing so, they will need to “stay alive as long as [they] can” and, perhaps more importantly, they are instructed to “record everything”. As the designers tell them, they “are not a fighter”; rather, they are here to “expose the truth” [29]. A similar text is absent in Whistleblower, but returns in Outlast II:

Lynn Langermann is an investigative journalist seeking the answers behind a pregnant woman murdered under impossible circumstances in rural Arizona. You are Blake Langermann, her husband, assistant, and cameraman. Record everything. Neither of you are fighters; to navigate the horrors waiting for you in the desert, your only choices are to run, hide, or die. [30]

The language used is close to that of the original, on the abilities and limitations of Langermann, as well as the subject of his investigation. Although the game does not actively enforce it, I would argue that the assignment set at the start of each game influences the role of the player. In framing both Outlast and its sequel in such a way, the developers have set down clear guidelines on how players are to interact with the world and what they are supposed to film as they are instructed to investigate and record everything. In addition, these messages clearly signpost the abilities and vulnerabilities of the player, where, from the outset of the game, they are positioned as a victim rather than a hero. This supposed lack of control manifests itself both within the story of each game, as well as in aspects of gameplay, and it is the plot elements which I will discuss first.

The narrative of both Outlast and Outlast II reiterates the experience of, in Krzywinska’s words, being out of control. This dynamic is reinforced by certain secondary characters, whose actions influence the in-game events in a variety of ways. In Outlast, the character of Father Archimbaud, an inmate of Mount Massive, openly interacts with Upshur and even hinders his progress. After responding to the initial objective to investigate the asylum, Upshur soon discovers that not all is well: the building is in disarray, and evidence of violence is everywhere, in the form of broken furniture, pools of blood and even dead bodies. There is, however, no sign of the perpetrators, or indeed of any living soul, and it is only when Upshur is grabbed and violently thrown to a lower floor by the burly inmate Chris Walker that he realises that he is not alone in the facility. As Upshur drifts in and out of consciousness, he is attended to by Father Archimbaud, and as the priest examines Upshur’s camcorder, he appears to experience a revelation: “I… I see. Merciful god, you have sent me an apostle. Guard your life, son, you have a calling” [31]. When Upshur regains his senses, the Father is nowhere to be seen, but he has left behind a message, written in blood: PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL. Aware that whoever, or whatever, is still inside Mount Massive is more than he bargained for, Upshur’s objective has changed: the investigation no longer matters, and instead, the game instructs the player to escape by unlocking the main doors. His assessment of his meeting with Father is brief: “There are words scrawled in blood everywhere. I’m getting an ugly feeling in my gut that the “Priest” is writing them, and for my benefit” [32]. Alongside his occupation as an investigator, the priest has assigned Upshur the role of witness, effectively taking control of the actions of the journalist.

Archimbaud will remain an instrumental figure throughout the early part of the game. After Upshur reaches the security control room from where the doors can be unlocked, the priest is seen on one of the monitors, flipping the switch to the main power supply and scuppering Upshur’s attempt at escape. A return to the control room after switching on the generator causes Archimbaud to once more approach Upshur directly, injecting him with a sedative in an attempt to keep the journalist within the asylum walls, commenting that: “I’m sorry, my son, I didn’t want to have to do this to you. But you can’t leave, not yet. There is so much yet for you to witness” [33]. Guided by notes and instructions left by Archimbaud, painted in blood, Upshur is led deeper into Mount Massive. Despite his distrust for the priest, he realises the weight of what he may have uncovered: “If he’s telling the truth, now I’ve got a way out. And a story to tell. He wants me to spread his gospel. I’ll tell the whole fucking world” [34]. Rather than a supernatural force, it is Archimbaud’s insistence on the act of witnessing which forces Upshur deeper into Mount Massive to discover the Walrider. It is his own free will which brought him, and the player here, and although players are able to control Upshur, it is Father Archimbaud who guides the journalist, showing a constant awareness of and control over what is witnessed. The final encounter with Archimbaud, now nailed to a crucifix and about to be set alight by fellow inmates, and his last words, are indicative of this: “You alone shall escape to tell them. This is your penultimate act of witness. […] You will watch and record my death, my resurrection. And together we will be free” [35]. Upshur finds himself beaten, bruised and tortured, barely hanging on to his consciousness and his sanity, yet he has a role here: Archimbaud has cast him as a witness, an apostle, who will see and record, before being rewarded with his freedom and proclaiming this gospel to the world. By that point, however, both Mount Massive and the Walrider have too great a hold on Upshur, and his reward ultimately escapes him. The ending of the game, with Upshur remaining at the facility, overcome by what he was sent to discover, clearly echoes the conclusion of many found footage offerings.

Within the plot of Outlast II, Langermann’s wife Lynn and childhood friend Jessica take on a role similar to Archimbaud, in which they (indirectly) control the player and their actions. After being separated from his wife in the helicopter crash, Langermann’s initial objective is simple: find Lynn. This will remain the goal throughout the game and brief encounters with Lynn only serve to reinforce this objective and Langermann’s desperation to save his wife. This emphasis on Lynn’s role is also evident in the opening text of the game, which frames Langermann as Lynn’s “husband, cameraman and assistant” [36]. Interestingly, this message differs from the text that was used in the 2016 demo, which predates the 2017 release by some months. In the demo, Langermann is framed as a central and more proactive protagonist:

You are Blake Langermann, a camera man working with your wife, Lynn. The two of you are investigative journalists willing to take risks and dig deep to uncover the stories no one else will dare touch. You’re following a trail of clues that started with the seemingly impossible murder of a pregnant woman known only as Jane Doe. The investigation has lead you miles into the Arizona desert, to a darkness so deep no one could shed light upon it, and a corruption so profound that going mad may be the only sane thing to do. [37]

By contrast, the final release foregrounds Lynn as the primary figure, both within the narrative and in terms of gameplay. As a result, Langermann, and by extension the player, have already lost some agency over their situation: this story is not about them, and it is all they can do but to find Lynn and perhaps survive.

The same can be said for the role of Langermann’s childhood friend Jessica, who is another main influence within the game. Although the majority of the action of Outlast II plays out within the cultist village in the Sonoran desert, these segments are intercut with what appear to be memories of Langermann’s schooldays, and in particular, the time he shared with Jessica. The girl was found dead as a result of tragic events at a young age, and the game remains ambiguous as to whether Jessica was accidentally killed or took her own life; however, Langermann’s lingering guilt in relation to these events is palpable. Within this sub-plot, the school location serves as a metaphor for Langermann’s unconscious mind and pent-up guilt, revisiting and reliving Jessica’s death as an act of penance. The status of these sequences remains unclear throughout the game: although players can move through and interact with the school building and objects within it, any recordings made while inside the school are saved only as static, leaving players to question the reality of these moments. The framing of these sequences as ‘in the past’, or perhaps ‘inside his head’, also means that players have no control over what occurs, instead simply navigating that which has already come to pass. Neither Lynn nor Jessica actively guide Langermann in so direct a way as Archimbaud does for Upshur; however, both Langermann’s history (the loss of his friend) and his possible future (the loss of his wife) offer clear motivations for his actions throughout the game. This is not Langermann’s assignment, nor is he here of his free will; rather, he has followed Lynn to Arizona to assist her. The events that befall him are on account of her disappearance, and his conviction to not lose her the way he lost Jessica. Indeed, Langermann’s dialogue near the end of the game starts confusing the two women, using Jessica’s name to refer to Lynn. Whereas Upshur’s control is removed by Archimbaud, and subsequently by the Walrider and Mount Massive itself, Langermann’s guilt means he was never in control in the first place.

A final point to mention in relation to the game’s narrative is the protagonist’s voice. Both Upshur and Park, in Whistleblower, function as what is essentially a blank canvas: players are provided with a name and a minimal context, but from that moment on, the men become largely invisible. Any noise they make are gasps and grunts of surprise, exertion or pain, and although both storylines feature a specific moment of body horror in which Upshur and Park are captured and tortured, there is not enough detail in the depiction of their bodies to create a disconnect with the player. By contrast, Langermann’s body is never fully visible, yet some of his features are more distinct. He wears glasses, and his vision will become blurred when he loses these. In addition, Langermann has a voice: rather than simply producing noise, he narrates and comments on events, both during gameplay and in the recordings. The absence of Upshur and Park will help sustain the illusion of player agency, even as they are coerced by other characters, whereas the presence of Langermann serves to further highlight his lack of control over his entire situation and indeed his own mind. In the design of both the protagonists and the secondary characters, Red Barrels have offered players a first person view and the ability to control Upshur, Park, or Langermann, whilst at the same time placing them in a situation in which their fate is influenced and, in many ways, already decided.

Not all elements that impact player agency are part of the plot, and some of them are embedded in the mechanics of the games. In borrowing the concept of found footage and handing the players a camcorder, they are granted a particular type of control over their experience. They are able to record as they play, focusing and framing as they see fit, and the information discovered is, in many ways, theirs alone. Most videogames will use a system of notes and artefacts that can be recovered by players to further illuminate the narrative and each Outlast game includes numerous documents that can be found such as letters and emails relating to other characters and unseen events. Whereas these materials, as in most games, can be uncovered through exploration, Outlast’s notes and recordings rely more strongly on player agency. These items cannot be discovered unless players are filming and unless they are filming the right moment in order to trigger the recording. If players wish to uncover all the game’s secrets, they will need to become the investigator and found footage filmmaker, keeping a record of their journey at all times, turning the camera this way and that in order to capture everything. At the same time, however, the camcorder is incomplete: like the camera in found footage films, the view of the camcorder is often frustrated and can be lost if the player fails to collect the batteries necessary for it to operate. In addition, each of the games includes a sequence where the camera is lost or damaged: in Outlast, for example, Upshur drops the camera, only to discover a cracked lens and occasional glitches when recovering it, thus further frustrating the supposed all-seeing eye. This example recalls the comments of both Heller-Nicholas and Aldana Reyes about the alignment of the viewer and the cameraman in found footage narrative, and the promise of damage to both character and audience. In addition, the damage to the camera further frustrates the visual control, the cracked lens and occasional glitches making it even harder to see.

What happens to the footage is also of note: any recordings taken by the player are registered, but not saved or indeed accessible after they have been captured. As a result, the player is put in a position similar to the filmmaker in found footage: everything is captured, but it is reviewed by someone other than the person who recorded it. Ownership has been transferred, whether players are aware of this or not. This idea is present most strongly in the original game, where recordings are saved as handwritten notes. The player knows what they have seen, and they have the evidence in the form of Upshur’s notes, yet there is no way to retrieve it. Control has been lost, or perhaps handed over, leaving them to question the reality of what they have witnessed. Outlast II both increases and lessens the control in this respect. The recordings saved to the journal use the footage collected by the players, yet these clips are tied to specific locations within the game, and are combined with a voiceover from Langermann, commenting on what has been captured. The player has agency over what has been filmed, but the authorship appears to be with Langermann, who interprets the footage. It is only in Whistleblower that the player is the author: although it uses a mechanic similar to Outlast, where recordings are made and saved as written notes, Park and his footage manage to leave Mount Massive alive and he is able to transfer it to the VIRALeaks website. At the same time, there are consequences to this transference of ownership, as is explained by an unseen figure during the ending of the game: “I need you to understand the bridge you are crossing here. You will do irrevocable damage to the company, you might even get close to something like justice. But. Once you click upload, your life is over” [38]. In each game, the player is given authorship over the footage, choosing what to focus on, yet in the act of recording, their ownership is removed, ultimately leaving them in the position of the found footage filmmaker, with no control over what has been captured.

The levels of control are not only tied into the narrative and the recordings, but also the gameplay itself. As is clear from the introduction to each game, as well as Morin’s comments on creating a combat-less experience, players have no option, as “your only choices are to run, hide, or die” [39]. As opposed to other horror titles, where players may obtain weapons in order to defend themselves and take down enemies, Outlast removes any such mechanics. The use of the camcorder precludes any real power being awarded to the player: in not allowing them access to weapons, players are unable to obtain any mastery over their assailants and forces them into a particular type of behaviour in how they navigate the game space. They are left vulnerable, unable to overcome, or even face up against, their enemies. In a direct confrontation, they have no chance, and the chase sequences present in each game work to enforce this vulnerability. In order to survive, players cannot attack, but rather, they need to navigate the game space to either run or hide. Indeed, the game space itself further highlights the lack of control players have. The interior of Mount Massive Asylum in Outlast and Whistleblower is littered with ways in which player movement is hindered: locked doors, broken furniture and blocked corridors, combined with the interference of other characters, funnel players down a particular path, to their salvation or their doom. Outlast II’s desert setting creates a different dynamic and makes use of large outside spaces. Certain obstacles are still in place to guide the player in the right direction, but overall, they are given much more freedom as to how they traverse the space. Interestingly, this does not grant more control to the players: the openness of the space removes their ability to mentally map the area. Upon turning a corner or ducking under a fence, players may face a change in landscape, a blocked pathway, or the appearance of a new enemy. This requires constant adjustment, leaving them unable to fully master the space in the same way they would be able to do with an inside location. Running, ducking and diving, the camcorder shaking, the traversal of the space of the asylum and the Arizona desert fully mimics the quality of most found footage films. Directorial control gives way to pure terror. As I have shown here, Krzywinska’s ideas of being in and out of control and their influence on player agency are found in the Outlast franchise in a several ways. Despite offering players agency over both the main character and the camera, Red Barrels uses both narrative and gameplay elements to frustrate control and guiding them through the experience. 

In the article “Return to Paranormalcy”, Bordwell notes that “I haven’t yet mentioned one creative problem discovered-footage filmmakers need to confront. Who’s responsible for what we see?” [40]. In Outlast, the answer to this question is simple: it is the player, in the form of Miles Upshur, Waylon Park and Blake Langermann, who picks up the camera to record their experience. In both its narrative and gameplay, the franchise is able to give and take control from the protagonists and, by extension, the players. Moving away from the directed experience of cinema, (horror) videogames allow their audiences to interact with the material, yet this supposed agency is often manipulated. The Outlast games use the framing and aesthetics of found footage films to establish and remove player agency, both allowing and removing control as the game progresses. In doing so, they position the player as filmmaker, witnessing and recording everything, but never able master their experience or retain authorship of the footage. The games answer the question as to who has made the recording, but what has happened since remains unclear. The result for each protagonist remains the same: the footage is out there, somewhere, as is the evil they wished to record: all too real and not yet beaten. As for the players themselves, they have met the inevitable ending of most found footage films, finding themselves missing, presumed dead. 

Notes  

[1] Steffan Powell, “Hideo Kojima says games and films will merge together,” BBC Newsbeat, January 26, 2017, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38737220/hideo-kojima-says-games-and-films-will-merge-together

[2] Red Barrels, Outlast, 2013.

[3] Red Barrels, Outlast: Whistleblower, 2014.

[4] Scott Meslow, “12 Years After ‘Blair Witch’, When Will the Found Footage Fad End?” The Atlantic, January 6, 2012, accessed: March 1, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/12-years-after-blair-witch-when-will-the-found-footage-horror-fad-end/250950/

[5] Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Found-Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 14, author’s emphasis.

[6] Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Reel Evil: A Critical Reassessment of Found Footage Horror.” Gothic Studies 17:2 (2015), 129.

[7] Heller-Nicholas, Found-Footage Horror Films, 24.

[8] Aldana Reyes, “Reel Evil”, 128-129.

[9] Neil McRobert, “Mimesis of Media: Found Footage Cinema and the Horror of the Real,” Gothic Studies 17:2 (2015), 138.

[10] McRobert, “Mimesis of Media”, 140, author’s emphasis.

[11] Aldana Reyes, “Reel Evil”, 130.

[12] Heller-Nicholas, Found-Footage Horror Films, 23.

[13] David Bordwell, “Return to Paranormalcy,” Reflections on Film Art, November 13, 2012, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/11/13/return-to-paranormalcy/

[14] Heller-Nicholas, Found-Footage Horror Films, 23, author’s emphasis.

[15] Aldana Reyes, “Reel Evil”, 130.

[16] Douglas Brown and Tanya Krzywinska, “Movie-Games and Game-Movies: Towards an Aesthetic of Transmediality,” in Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, ed. Warren Buckland (London: Routledge, 2009), 86.

[17] Brown and Krzywinska, “Movie-Games and Game-Movies”, 87.

[18] Brown and Krzywinska, “Movie-Games and Game-Movies”, 86.

[19] Brown and Krzywinska, “Movie-Games and Game-Movies”, 87, author’s emphasis.

[20] Krzywinska, Tanya, “Hands-On Horror”, in ScreenPlay: Cinema /Videogames / Interfaces, eds. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (London: Wallflower, 2002), 207, author’s emphasis.

[21] Krzywinska, “Hands-On Horror”, 207.

[22] Krzywinska, “Hands-On Horror”, 207.

[23] Krzywinska, “Hands-On Horror”, 208, author’s emphasis.

[24] Krzywinska, “Hands-On Horror”, 208.

[25] Phillipe Morin, “Horror in the Making: How Red Barrels Outlasted Outlast,” Gamasutra, January 29, 2015, accessed: March 1, 2017, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/234588/Horror_in_the_Making_How_Red_Barrels_outlasted_Outlast.php

[26] Morin, “Horror in the Making”.

[27] Morin, “Horror in the Making”.

[28] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[29] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[30] Red Barrels, Outlast II, 2017.

[31] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[32] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[33] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[34] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[35] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[36] Red Barrels, Outlast II.

[37] Red Barrels, Outlast II: Demo, 2016.

[38] Red Barrels, Whistleblower.

[39] Red Barrels, Outlast.

[40] Bordwell, “Return to Paranormalcy,” author’s emphasis.

Notes on contributor

Dr Madelon Hoedt lectures at the Faculty for Creative Industries of the University of South Wales. She has completed her PhD entitled “Acting Out: The Pleasures of Performance Horror”, and she has published and presented papers on horror on screen and stage. Her current research focuses on immersive and pervasive experiences, paying particular interest to issues of narrative, stagecraft and embodied experience in live performance and video games (specifically in relation to horror and the Gothic).

Bibliography  

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