Everyday Terror
Jonathan Crane in his book Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film argues against the type of genre criticism that denies the historical dimension in genre and is thus unable to address any historical mutation within the horror genre.
He argues that the horror films that terrified the audiences of the 1930s and 40s are merely a nostalgic curiosity to the audiences of the 1990s. Crane sees a fundamental change in the nature of the horror film: today’s horror films are more violent and nihilistic than the classics of the 30s, 40s and 50s. For Crane, the violence and nihilism of the modern horror film reflect the anxiety, violence, and disintegration of everyday life in the modern world. In today’s world, with the disorder and horror associated with social problems such as AIDS, racism, homelessness, the possibility of nuclear disaster, and environmental collapse, monsters like Dracula and King Kong no longer have the power to terrorize: new, scarier monsters are needed for new, scarier times. Crane recommends that genre criticism take into account historical and social changes when looking at horror films to better understand any real mutations that may be occurring within the genre. One of the elements that makes this book so interesting is Crane’s attempt to historically trace the interplay between “terror and everyday life” and its concurrent expression in horror films through case studies of Nosferatu, Them and Friday the 13th.
Crane also criticizes the psychoanalytic approach to the study of the horror genre and the manner in which this criticism situates the experiences and meanings of horror exclusively within the terrain of the unconscious. Crane argues that psychoanalytic critics like James Twitchell leave no other space or context where audiences could have different readings and experiences concerning the themes and meanings of horror films. The sexual anxiety and unconscious turbulence of puberty predetermine the assumed teenage audience’s readings and experiences of horror films. This gives psychoanalytic theorists an extremely ahistorical and acontextual slant. There is no room in this genre criticism for different historical, social, and cultural meanings of horror films and for historical change. Crane sees the horror film as evolving and changing over time, reflecting and responding to the changes in social reality and experience. This reliance on the unconscious in psychoanalytic genre criticism would also make any naturalistic or ethnographic study of horror fans and their reception of horror films superfluous; a qualitative study of this area would be specifically concerned with the different personal, social, and cultural contexts of horror film and its audience.
Along with technological and institutional changes that affect the style and content of horror films, Crane would argue that there is a dialectic between the terror in everyday life and the terror in horror films; with one side seemingly trying to out do the other. How does one make the “recreational terror”of horror films relevant to a real world that surpasses our most frightening nightmares? Along with these lines however, Crane does not discuss the bankruptcy and exhaustion of current horror film production in the U.S. that routinely and mechanically rolls out either sequels or remakes. (I do not on principle find sequels a problem; sequelization has a rich tradition in U.S. horror films.) The burst of originality and creatively of the horror genre last witnessed in the 70s and even 80s seems to have disappeared.
- pieto
