1. Whither goest, “American Nightmare”?

As the 1980s came to a close, the American horror film seemed locked into an endless loop of formulaic repetition. Box office returns for once-profitable franchises like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and other less prolific series began to flag due to growing audience disinterest, and most of these series did not seemingly survive beyond the early 1990s. The crossover success of many “art-horror” films (e.g., William Friedkin’s 1973 The Exorcist) seemed a thing of the past, and the raw exploitation edge of earlier shockers (e.g., Wes Craven’s 1972 Last House on the Left) was now subsumed by the horror film’s turn toward safe, almost self-mocking (and certainly audience-comforting) formulas in which even gory effects failed to register spectatorial bodily affect. It truly appeared that the much-touted horror renaissance of the 1970s was forever buried beneath uninspired sequels, and there were few “horror auteurs” left to fill the creative void. This is not to say that the end of the decade was entirely bereft of originality—see Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987), for example, although it too spawned a number of sequels—but the horror film in America had largely reverted back to niche consumption by its cultish fan base, no longer enjoying the wider audiences it had garnered during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Of course, this sort of periodization by decade is inherently flawed, and my selection of the dates 1991-2006 is rather arbitrary, but the last decade in American horror films has certainly seen a boom in interest, brought on by new social anxieties, increased postmodern influence, and retrospective production trends. Nineteen-ninety-one seems a prime year to begin a brief overview of this period because a very popular film, The Silence of the Lambs, swept the Oscars that year, awarded top honors by the Hollywood film industry itself—and yet, as Jancovich (2002) says, there was (and still is) debate over whether or not Lambs is a horror film. As he argues, critics were more likely to legitimize the film as a “thriller” or a “mystery,” while still “present[ing] the film as offering the pleasures associated with the horror movie” (p. 156), despite the many thematic motifs, visual devices, and plot functions identifying it as such. Indeed, the serial killer film has always presented a very blurred boundary between horror and other genres (like mysteries and thrillers), especially since films like Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) first located the “abnormal” mind as “the monster within.” This genre blur has continued over the past few decades with increasingly dark serial killer tales like Seven (David Fincher, 1995), From Hell (Hughes Brothers, 2001), The Cell (Tarsem Singh, 2000), and The Bone Collector (Phillip Noyce, 1999), not to mention three other Hannibal Lecter films: Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986), Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001), and Red Dragon (Brett Ratner, 2002). Hence, a horror film like Silence of the Lambs could still be critically acclaimed by masquerading as anything other than horror, distanced (more or less) from the formulaic slasher films that had by then become synonymous with the genre.

Such was the state of American horror films as the 1990s began. Of course, it is difficult to see the horror genre as having a definite evolutionary course (not least because the monster, as the core device of the horror film, is frequently figured as somehow “devolved”), for genre production has always been profit-oriented, concerned with successful formulas, sequels, spin-offs, and imitators. [1] This has especially been true since the first big “blockbuster” movies of the 1970s (e.g., Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws), for Hollywood now structures the strength of box-office returns upon a film’s opening weekend (via wide distribution) and a gradual recouping of costs via the home video and DVD market. As a result, huge production budgets are allocated for films that must cater to the broadest mass tastes and take the fewest creative risks, not being selectively distributed or expected to garner slowly building theatrical returns—especially now that past horror venues like grindhouses, drive-ins, midnight movies, and other specialty genre cinemas are a rarity (although much of the foreign, low-budget, and exploitation horror once frequenting these venues has now been shifted to the more profitable direct-to-video market). With the consolidation of a few giant media conglomerates owning both studios and theatres, a mainstreaming of genre products results in an effort to assure the utmost immediate profitability from a film—and thus every successful formula is repeated and given wide distribution, despite diminishing returns. Meanwhile, audiences of genre films are not mindless and passive consumers, but rather people actively trying to fulfill their particular desire, becoming less prone to accept increasingly inferior products—at least until some new generic revision comes along which revitalizes old formulas and gives birth to new ones.

One example of an interesting minor development in horror during the 1990s was the “race horror” films exemplified by Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992), The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1992), Tales From the Hood (Rusty Cundieff, 1995), and Bones (Ernest Dickerson, 2001), which each took racial inequality as their basis, often using African-American characters as protagonists, and some directly targeted (however exploitatively, recalling the blaxploitation horror films of the 1970s) to African-American youth audiences through links to rap culture. Despite the somewhat progressive bent of this small sub-faction of recent horror, Hollywood producers have not been as sensitive to ethnic concerns in their appropriation of horror ideas from various (non-Western) countries. [2] The remaking of plots from the recent Asian horror craze, for example, has translated films like Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), Ju-on (Takashi Shimizu, 2000), Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002), and Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001) into an American context, robbing much of their national specificity. Although import quotas (now fully incorporated under the rhetoric of globalization) still guarantee that American films dominate most foreign commercial film markets, recent American horror has arguably come to directly inspire fewer derivative films in foreign markets like Italy and Japan than in the past. In turn, American horror now looks to take aboard proven profit makers like foreign horror successes and remakes of its own pioneering back catalogue (e.g., 1970’s American horror), rather than drawing upon the same independent, low-budget tradition that spawned that back catalogue.

Meanwhile, many of the “classical” horror stories (e.g., vampires, werewolves, etc.) have met with apathy and mixed results during the last fifteen years, some attempting serious dramatic effect and literary pretensions to elevate their status to “art-horror,” while others typically finding greater success when combined with other genres (such as the action movie). Examples of the former include Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994), Wolf (Mike Nichols, 1994), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branaugh, 1994), and Mary Reilly (Stephen Frears, 1996), while examples of the latter include The Mummy (Stephen Sommers, 1999), Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998), Underworld (Len Wiseman, 2003), and Van Helsing (Stephen Sommers, 2004). As the genre-mixing qualities of such action/horror movies attest, the influence of postmodernism was a major factor in resurrecting the American horror film during the last decade, and it continues to play a vital (and controversial) role.

2. How “new” is this “New Nightmare”?

Since the early 1980s, there has been a growing body of theoretical work and critical reappraisal of the horror genre. As in past genres like the Western and the film noir, perhaps the increasingly formulaic nature of American horror during the 1980s helped give rise to some of these academic theories (many of them overly reductive in scope) because the genre was now easier to “pin down.” An academic interest in cult cinema and other “low” cultural forms was also developing during this period [3], no doubt linked as much to cultural studies as to postmodernism’s leveling of all hitherto stratified cultural objects. Since the 1990s, the full force of postmodernity has found its way into the horror genre—with strange results. (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, employs modern technology to simulate a whole repertoire of “primitive” visual effects, amplifying the film’s Victorian London setting, circa the birth of cinema.)

But if, as critics like Frederic Jameson have argued, postmodernist imitation works to exhaust modernist techniques of their high appeals to subversive or shocking affects, what does this mean for the horror film, a “low” genre already premised upon shock and affect? In some cases, a particular film’s appeals to postmodern modes of self-reflexivity, pastiche, parody, and simulation are enough to somehow elevate it artistically, and thus garner more serious critical attention. Although some have argued that postmodernism combats the author-function shaping a text’s reception, I would argue that postmodern eclecticism actually enhances the author-function (e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s pastiches), allowing “low” cultural texts to be consumed safely by “high” culture critics. Furthermore, postmodernism makes horror films very difficult to analyze as either politically progressive or reactionary. [4] Sharrett (1996) makes the point that a postmodern veneer of self-reflexivity often merely masks a horror film’s reactionary politics (p. 254-55). Given the limited scope of this brief overview, I will be concerned much less with the genre’s political practices than its aesthetic ones, but the former also remain important to bear in mind.

Several films that exemplify the horror film’s newfound surge of self-reflexivity are Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994) and Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), two of the more notable American horror entries from the 1990s. Foregrounding the narrative patterns of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and of 1980s slasher movies in general (respectively), these two films effectively announced the vacuity of 1980s horror formulas while nevertheless relying upon many of the same suspense- and shock-generating sequences used by those earlier genre products. New Nightmare finds the real-life actors and filmmakers associated with the then-dead Elm Street series being assailed by an ancient entity that has previously taken the form of Freddy Kruger, having been contained within the Nightmare films through the ritualistic power of story. Speaking within the diegesis, Craven himself explains that the entity is attempting to break into the real world because the Elm Street story has become too familiar to people (and hence not affective enough) and “watered down to make it an easier sell.” As the diegetic Craven writes out a new Elm Street screenplay to re-capture the entity, the filmic events he writes begin happening to the real people around him, leading to a delirious case of mise-en-abyme whereby the film-within-a-film and diegetic reality become indistinguishable from one another. New Nightmare speaks to the mythic, culturally universal role that horror texts serve in society—a role at odds with the homogenized, tongue-in-cheek sequels that began positioning Freddy as a sort of wisecracking anti-hero. Although New Nightmare is itself a sort of sequel (however self-reflexive) and a compendium of ideas from throughout the Elm Street series, Craven seems to be strongly distancing himself from what has become of his original concept, insisting upon a sophisticated return to “adult” horror [5] (over formulaic juvenilia) by virtue of its appeals to self-reflexivity.

Scream appeared several years later and became a huge box-office success, not least because it appeared to parody films like the Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13th series. As apparent to any fan of horror since Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), the predictable “rules” (many of which were incorporated into Clover’s (1996) famous analysis of the “Final Girl”) of who survives and who dies in slasher films are here announced by a young horror buff. Regardless of this advice, a bevy of teenagers are killed off by a masked killer obsessed with horror movie trivia. The killer is revealed to be two maladjusted youths on a revenge spree who claim that watching horror films have not triggered their actions and motives, but have simply made their methods “more creative.” Playing as much upon horror clichés as upon frequent conservative outcries over the purported power of horror films to inspire copycat crimes, Scream may foreground the rules by which it operates, but it still loyally adheres to them. In fact, one ironic source of viewing pleasure derives from the plot’s surprising obedience to the very rules and narrative conventions so explicitly spelled out mid-film; though we may predict that the self-aware film will change the course of its own actions, we are rather pleased to find the rules standing solid after so much play, as self-reflexivity operates to reinforce rather than subvert conventions. This makes the film more of a parody than a complicated critique of banal horror formulas—borne out by the fact that Scream inspired two sequels, the Scary Movie comedy series (parodies of a parody, ironically), and set the tone for many subsequent slick, teen-oriented horror films (many featuring young TV stars) with far less imagination and self-reflexive awareness (e.g., I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997)). If New Nightmare had seemed the nail in the coffin for 1980s slasher formulas, Scream merely served as an unlikely conduit for the recycling of those formulas for a new generation during the late-1990s and beyond. [6]

As the slasher movie soldiered on blandly, two other monstrous subgenres found new life during this period: ghosts and zombies. A phenomenal box-office success, The Sixth Sense (1999) tells the story of a psychologist who, after befriending a young boy who can see dead people, discovers that he has himself been killed and become a ghost. Though the plot was nothing terribly new (e.g., see Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) and Siesta (Mary Lambert, 1987)), the film works as an effective horror piece that builds a strong atmosphere in place of gore. However, in light of its much-touted twist ending, it is tempting to read the film’s success as partly inspired by a further reaction against the formulaic patterns of 1980s horror. Often compared to the well-kept secret of Psycho’s climax, the ending of The Sixth Sense served to bring a sense of genuine surprise and a splash of pseudo-artistic auteur vision back to the horror genre in a form palatable (i.e., non-exploitative) enough for mass audiences and mainstream critics alike. Its success spawned a long string of imitators and fellow travelers of ghostly territory (including demonic possession films), such as The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), Identity (James Mangold, 2003), a 2000 theatrical re-release of The Exorcist, a number of remakes (to be discussed further shortly), and Shyamalan’s own subsequent forays into horror (Signs, 2002; The Village, 2004). Several years after The Sixth Sense, Danny Boyle’s British 2002 zombie hit 28 Days Later was imported to America, opening to critical acclaim and strong ticket sales. As indebted to George Romero’s Dead trilogy as to various Italian films (notably Umberto Lenzi’s 1980 action/horror Nightmare City, which also featured fast-moving zombies), 28 Days Later is one of the strongest, most effective (if somewhat unoriginal) horror films of recent years. But, like The Sixth Sense, its success inspired a string of other movies, including a remake of Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004), the zombie parody Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), and Romero’s own intelligent return to the zombie film, Land of the Dead (George Romero, 2005).

3. Which nightmare do people want?

As noted earlier, sequels and spin-offs are nothing new to horror films and other genre products, but in the post-Scream era, the creative void in American horror has seen Hollywood embracing a greater willingness to repeat past formulas through updated remakes instead of simply more sequels of franchise films. Scream highlighted the kitschy predictability of those past formulas, but nonetheless served as a feature-length homage to them. It should be little surprise then that Hollywood’s next move would be to remake well-known American horror films from the 1970s and 1980s, repackaging the same formulas for a new youth audience unlikely to have actually seen the originals. These remakes attempt to capitalize upon the notoriety of the originals (often referring to the originals as canonical texts), invoking the name-of-the-genre as author-function. The low-budget origins of the original versions are erased, updated by high production values to make them seem less campy and dated. These remakes flaunt their supposed slickness and modernity, hiding their absence of originality beneath pretty veneers and rapid editing, making horror seem like a less accessible route for young low-budget filmmakers. Two prime examples of this are the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003) and Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004). Each invokes the reputation of the original film, but each also lacks the progressive subtext that made the originals so notable and enduring. For example, in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, cannibalism becomes a metaphor for consumerism, with one character remarking that the dead are returning to the shopping mall out of instinct—but in the remake, only bits of this dialogue remain and consumerism is far less critiqued in other ways. Like its revamped kin, the Dawn remake is the very sort of consumer commodity that Romero detested in the first place. Although other recent remakes include several plots taken from somewhat earlier films (The Haunting, Thirteen Ghosts, House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax, The Island of Dr. Moreau), most take films from the 1970s and 1980s as their basis. These include The Fog, When a Stranger Calls, The Hills Have Eyes, The Amityville Horror, The Omen, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Hitcher, and so on. Other recent remakes include the Japanese horror films noted earlier, plus Gus Van Sant’s 1998 ill-fated remake of Psycho. [7] While the originals that inspired these remakes are all genre products (and hence commodities of some kind) and do not necessarily foster progressive readings, the fact that sequels to several of these remakes have also begun appearing testifies to the further commoditization of the original ideas.

One of the most frequent complaints about these remakes (and recent American horror in general) is the overuse of visual and aural shock cuts to continually startle the viewer. Though shock cuts have always been part of the modern horror film’s repertoire, they are generally seen as responsible for mere “cheap shocks,” not for generating a strong sense of atmosphere. Indeed, both critics and horror fans often privilege suspense and unrelenting tension over the desensitizing effect of too many shock cuts that merely impede the narrative, covering up for poor storytelling. Some have remarked that the abundance of shock cuts may be due to the influence of frenetic music video editing or the higher speed of absorbable input in this so-called Information Age. While these causes may indeed be somewhat true, it seems more likely that today’s youth horror audience is simply no longer frightened by the sort of horror filmmaking that worked so well on 1970s audiences (thus opening the opportunity to remake those films in newer, more commercially viable ways for new audiences). Just as 1930s horror no longer has the capacity to frighten viewers today, today’s youth are more likely to laugh or yawn at the low-budget horror fare of the 1970s and 1980s, especially after being essentially primed to do so by self-parodic films like Scream. While the backlash against overuse of shock cuts continues, it may just be the case that critics and audiences accustomed to the output of the 1970s horror renaissance are simply facing a growing generation gap in horror consumption as a younger generation of moviegoers becomes the primary horror audience—an audience unable to truly appreciate what made those earlier films so groundbreaking and terrifying. In this way, the recent spate of remakes does little to provoke positive reevaluation of just what made the originals so effective, instead (falsely) equating newer technology and higher production values with vast improvements upon the originals, all the while lacking the verve and affect of the parent films. [8]

Another complaint leveled at these remakes is a “mainstreaming” of bodily destruction (often seen as originating with the 1980s horror franchise and formula pieces) that empties gore of its visceral affect, more likely inspiring laughs and disdain for the victimized characters than genuine disgust and discomfort. [9] As Wells (2000) notes, when monsters exist within horror formulas merely to destroy interchangeable victims, an absence of diegetic values and ideas ensues, creating a sense of absurdity that quickly tips over into black humor (p. 96-7). A gradual loosening of the MPAA’s rating system has allowed greater amounts of hardcore gore to appear in mainstream films ranging from Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) to The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004) to various horror films. The rise of DVDs has also led to a proliferation of unrated cuts of commercial films (mostly comedies and horror) still too extreme for wide distribution—though this may be in many cases more of a commercial move than a creative one since Hollywood recoups much of its profits from the home video market and thus has a large stake in making DVD releases all the more appealing for would-be repeat viewers.

Nevertheless, into this area of relaxed mores have stepped a number of films that seek to restore all of the suspense, atmosphere, and sadism (and therefore spectatorial masochism) of 1970s horror by way of direct appeals to exploitation itself. These non-remakes try to capture the feel and affect of 1970s horror, even the campy and low-budget appeal of such films, often promoted with references to benchmark 1970s films (e.g., Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or the time period in general. They seem to differentiate themselves from flat, “clean” Hollywood remakes of 1970s horror, using sustained visceral unease over sudden shock cuts, and are more likely to self-referentially play with genre conventions and indulge in pastiche (often by including myriad references and in-jokes for astute horror buffs). These films exemplify the “cultification” process described in Mendik and Harper’s (2000) discussion of From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996) with regard to postmodern pastiches that intentionally position themselves as cult objects on a textual level (p. 241). Although virtually all Hollywood films are meant to economically exploit audiences (as is certainly the case with remakes of 1970s horror), this subset of films romanticizes exploitation as an aesthetic, not just an economic practice—exploiting characters instead of audiences. These films include Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, 2002), Saw (James Wan, 2004), Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1996), High Tension (Alexandre Aja, 2003), 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005), House of 1000 Corpses (Rob Zombie, 2003), The Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie, 2005), and Grind House (Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez, 2007). All appreciatively displaying the influence of 1970s exploitation horror, these “neo-exploitation” films may or may not utilize black humor to temper their extreme sadism. Posed in opposition to the comforting and routine violence of most Hollywood horror fare, they stubbornly hearken back to a far less politically correct era when it was more acceptable for victims (mostly women) to be tortured and killed in ways meant to cause strong visceral reactions. [10] As opposed to most Hollywood movies, these films may more often appeal to the same cinephiles and horror purists who are willing to look beyond the dated and campy aspects of the original exploitation films that have inspired this latest group. Of course, most of these films are still produced and distributed via dominant Hollywood practices, so cultural distinctions in the production, marketing, and consumption of these films can become blurred; for example, Alexandre Aja directed High Tension in France before it was imported to the U.S., but he subsequently directed the very American (complete with an overuse of shock cuts) remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Still, these neo-exploitation films remain a site of interesting cultural contention between viewers on either side of horror’s widening generation gap.