The mediocrity of unhorror
Darryl Jones has recently suggested to label unhorror the blockbuster, mainstream “marketization” of the post-millennial horror, which compensates for its depoliticized and polished nature by the implementation of the now “dominant aesthetic technique” called scare-jumps or “jump-shocks”. Scare-jumps are a cinematic device which entails “long periods of tense silence punctuated by loud noises (what the film critic Mark Kermode has termed the ‘quiet-quiet-BANG!’ technique” (Jones 2018: 141, 145). As Mathias Clasen has noted, “sound effects, such as sudden loud noises to accompany fright-inducing visuals, […] play a major role in producing fear response,” a technique particularly honed in survival horror videogames (Clasen 2017: 151).
It seems that, in order to bypass desensitization and cognitive habituation in what was (in those long gone pre-Covid-19 times) an increasingly saturated niche, as well as to defy expectations and delay ennui, the neuroendocrine kick provided by horror has been either
heightened in an in-niche, within-genre arms race to create even more scare jumps, more splatter, more gore; or
interwoven into the fabric of other genres.
In the first case, it is quite remarkable how extremely bloody franchises set a stronghold in mainstream cinema (e.g., Saw, The Purge). But producers beware: when I originally wrote this piece, there was no ‘pure’ horror film in the first 100 All Time Box Office worldwide grosses, a list where epic mythos, animation folktales, and fantasy reign supreme. Even when calibrated to include only the highest grossing Rated R films of all time, the first 100 positions merely contain a handful of horror-related films (online data from Box Office Mojo, March 2019). Thus, the products of this scare-jump driven, within-genre arms race cannot financially compete with more articulate character-driven storytelling’s devices and plot points, as repetitive as they can be in their own way. Which further begs the question: morphologically speaking, and adjusting for inflation and relative historical differences, are the most successful horror films those centered on the evolutionarily selected storytelling devices typical of folktales and myths?
If we take the unfortunately neglected Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir J. Propp (originally published in 1928) and compare its plot diagrams to such popular franchises such as Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street, Raimi’s Evil Dead, Scott’s Alien, King’s It, or Stoker’s Dracula by Coppola, it would seem that the most memorable and successful horror films are those that, all else being equal, stick to the “universal grammar in world fiction, [the] deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome” (Gottschall 2012). Thus, the most successful formula seems to be the one that does not merely rely on neuroendocrine tricks like scare jumps but the one that builds a horror epic, that is, a modern, metaphorical descent to the underworld akin to the ancient Greek katabasis but adapted to reflect and respond to our own modern, culturally mediated, and socially relevant fears. As far as monsters are concerned, the presence of cognitively counterintuitive zombies, ghouls, ghosts, and their ilk can help the diffusion and success of specific genre characters and ideas (provided that the artistic niche has not been already saturated by them), but without a heroic character, whose fears, hopes, struggles, and dreams are historically, socially, and culturally determined for its audience, there can be no success, no role-playing, and no identification.
Structuralism in all its glory: a table from the excellent Italian translation of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Source: Propp, V. J. (2000). Morfologia della fiaba. Con un intervento di Claude Lévi-Strauss e una replica dell’autore. A cura di Gian Luigi Bravo, p. 145. Turin: Einaudi. Originally published in 1966.
Follow the money (and find a bit of horror everywhere)
Option (2), that is, the mishmash of horror and other genres, raises quite another interesting point. Given the cognitive ‘stickiness’ of certain minimally counterintuitive violations/tropes typical of the horror genre, and the fact that the building blocks of any genre can be exported elsewhere (with varying degrees of success), many of such tropes have been grafted onto other mainstream genres to reinvigorate them. Just to remain within the boundaries of recent blockbuster cinema, just think about Steven Spielberg’s and George Lucas’ gruesome, shocking scenes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (USA, 1984) or Spielberg and Michael Crichton’s masterful mix of technothriller and monster movie in Jurassic Park (USA, 1993); Sam Raimi’s body horror and signature cinematic techniques in Spider-Man 2 (USA, 2004); the splatter elements Peter Jackson integrated in his rendition of Tolkien’s fantasy The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies (resp., USA-NZ 2001-2003; USA-NZ, 2012-2014); and Guillermo Del Toro’s oneiric horror and dark fantasy elements (e.g., Pan’s Labyrinth, Spain/Mexico, 2006).
Box office data at hand, it looks as if deconstructed horror tropes are more successful when presented in a piecemeal fashion to spice up the narrative in another genre. This has increasingly been the case after the unprecedented post-1960s mixing of cinematographic genres and tropes under the aegis of postmodernism and, more recently, metamodernism (van der Akker, Gibbons, and Vermuelen 2017). Just think about the evolution of seminal Italian horror genre from the original “gialli” (crime/noir/thriller films), which in turn influenced many a director (cue Quentin Tarantino’s penchant for graphic violence and splatter; Bondanella 2014). This historical topic is equally fascinating and complicated, and for the time being I’ll content myself with leaving some suggestions for further research in the note [1] below.
Notes
This post has been originally written in pre-pandemic (and pre-It Chapter 2) May 2019.
[1] When evaluating the reciprocal influences and cultural descent of artistic tropes within a cinematographic genre, we need to differentiate between (a) the audience, its response, and its immediate effects on the industry (box office and financial success translating into further investments and productions), and (b) the inter-generational, intellectual relationships among authors, screenwriters, and filmmakers (dissociated, up to certain point, from box office success and immediate influence: tropes and even isolated scenes can outlive their original hosts and be replicated elsewhere, a bit like horizontal gene transfer between bacteria or the endogenous retroviruses embedded in our genome; additionally, from a longue-durée perspective, the audience of today is the filmmaking crew of tomorrow). Box office may provide a proxy for popularity – but what about the longitudinal tracking of revenues for those so-called ‘cult classics’ that gained larger visibility and even appreciation through VHS, Laser Discs, DVDs, Blu-Ray, or digital rental and purchase? What about untraceable downloads or torrents, especially in the early 2000s, and their postmodern effect on contemporary and future audience and producers? And how can we properly take into account critics’ opinions and their impact on the audience? Consider the ongoing Hollywood attempts at controlling the narrative around its products by exerting pressures on review-aggregation websites such as Rotten Tomatoes. These are larger epistemological questions behind method in the historical research of cultural ideas that need be addressed somehow. In any case, big data researchers beware: looking at mere, decontextualized financial success and restricting the analysis to just a genre may not be the right way to delve deeper into a potential neurohistorical study of horror.
Refs.
Akker, Robin van der, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermuelen (eds.) (2017). Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bondanella, Peter (2014). A History of Italian Cinema. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Box Office Mojo, March 2019. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/
Clasen, Mathias (2017). Why Horror Seduces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gottschall, Jonathan (2013). The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Makes Us Human. New York and London: Mariner Books.
Jones, Darryl (2018). Sleeping with Your Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Propp, Vladimir (2003). Morphology of the Folktale. First Edition transl. by L. Scott with an Introduction by S. Pirkova-Jakoboon. Second Edition Revised and Edited with a Preface by L. A. Wagner. New Introduction by A. Dundes. Austin: University of Texas Press. Originally published in 1968.