The New Fear – How horror cinema uncaged… | Little White Lies

Obama Era Cinema

The New Fear – How hor­ror cin­e­ma uncaged America’s inter­nal monster

19 Oct 2016

Words by Justine Smith

Stylised illustration of a young woman with dark hair wearing a red shirt, against a dark blue background with two shadowy figures in the background.
Stylised illustration of a young woman with dark hair wearing a red shirt, against a dark blue background with two shadowy figures in the background.
Jus­tine Smith exam­ines how movies like The House of the Dev­il and Lords of Salem use nos­tal­gia to expose a frac­tured nation­al identity.

Just as Rea­gan had Die Hard and Bush had The Dark Knight, so America’s 44th Com­man­der in Chief, Barack Oba­ma, will come to be asso­ci­at­ed with spe­cif­ic films from the last eight years. So what exact­ly is Oba­ma Era Cin­e­ma, and what does it reveal about the world we live in today? Have your say @LWLies #Oba­maEraCin­e­ma.

For much of Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, hor­ror cin­e­ma, which so often reflects the men­tal state of a nation, turned inward. Over the past eight years, a cer­tain trend has reflect­ed a cri­sis in Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty: the mon­ster is no longer out­side and the call is com­ing from inside the house. The fear seemed root­ed in a his­to­ry of injus­tice, and a chang­ing idea of what it means to be Amer­i­can. The evil that was once the oth­er”, was there inside of us the whole time. The dif­fi­cul­ty in fac­ing this new threat inspires a deep sense of dread, a fear that what you thought to be true was a lie.

While these films served more uni­ver­sal­ly as para­bles about addic­tion, strife, and fam­i­ly, they ulti­mate­ly point­ed to a threat that was mere­ly lay­ing dor­mant: hid­den in his­to­ry books or con­cealed by the gov­ern­ment. The fear that Amer­i­cans were fac­ing was not an infil­tra­tion, but a mon­ster that had become a part of them­selves. The night­mare found in films like The Lords of Salem, Sin­is­ter, Let Me In and The Cab­in in the Woods fig­ured the threat to an Amer­i­can way of life as being woven into a hid­den part of their identity.

Most of these films oper­ate on a meta­tex­tu­al lev­el. They explore the idea of a nar­ra­tive by way of pre­sent­ing a self-con­scious nar­ra­tive, bring­ing atten­tion to the sto­ry with­in the sto­ry. In Sin­is­ter, this emerges by way of 8mm films dis­cov­ered by a true crime writer, Elli­son Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), who dis­cov­ers the trace of seem­ing­ly uncon­nect­ed mur­ders from dif­fer­ent decades that links them to one killer. As he goes deep­er into the films, the fab­ric of his real­i­ty begins to crum­ble, as his rela­tion­ship with his fam­i­ly dete­ri­o­rates. Long before he arrived in this new home with the inten­tion of writ­ing a new book, Oswalt seems doomed to repeat his mis­takes, as well as per­pet­u­ate a pat­tern of cycli­cal domes­tic vio­lence. The hor­ror which ini­tial­ly presents itself as the oth­er, by way of a mon­ster that seems to grow out of these first-per­son doc­u­ments, emerges as some­thing that exists not only with­in the home but more cru­cial­ly, with­in Elli­son him­self. This is not a sto­ry of pos­ses­sion either, as the mon­ster that emerges from Elli­son exist­ed long before he encoun­tered this case as evi­dence by his wife’s con­tin­ued warn­ing sides of him falling into old and dan­ger­ous pat­terns of addic­tive and abu­sive behaviour.

In The Lords of Salem, we have a sim­i­lar nar­ra­tive thread con­nect­ing Hei­di (Sheri Moon Zom­bie), a late-night DJ, to the past. When a strange album arrives at the sta­tion, Hei­di plays it on the air, ini­ti­at­ing a spir­i­tu­al por­tal from the present day to the town’s vio­lent past. As with Elli­son, how­ev­er, the music doesn’t trans­plant some­thing inside Hei­di, but reveals what was long hold­ing below the sur­face. Like Elli­son, those around Hei­di are con­cerned she is once again falling into old cycles of abuse.

As a para­ble for addic­tion, The Lords of Salem is a bleak por­trait of a woman los­ing hold of her life. How­ev­er, it oper­ates on a much grander scale, reveal­ing a repeat­ed and ingrained his­to­ry of vio­lence with­in the Amer­i­can fab­ric of iden­ti­ty. A theme recur­rent over most of Rob Zombie’s films, he uses pas­tiche and cin­e­mat­ic allu­sions, to con­nect the vio­lence of his nar­ra­tives to those of the past. In his Hal­loween remakes, this oper­ates on a micro lev­el. Strip­ping John Carpenter’s films of their roman­ti­cism, Zom­bie sug­gests a heav­ier weight of vio­lence on the indi­vid­ual – opt­ing for less escapism in how he builds sus­pense and char­ac­ter. While many crit­ics bemoaned con­tex­tu­al­is­ing Michael Myers vio­lence as a symp­tom of bul­ly­ing, Zom­bie sug­gests that vio­lence is not an evil for­eign enti­ty, but some­thing learned through cycli­cal pat­terns of abuse.

Person in striped costume and facepaint standing in an ornate indoor setting.

This idea is tak­en even fur­ther in The Lords of Salem, as direc­tor Zom­bie digs deep­er into the past all the way back to the Salem witch tri­als. Part of the atmos­phere of the film is devot­ed to the idea that in cel­e­brat­ing our his­to­ry, we strip it of its vio­lence. Salem has become a town that not only prof­its off the vio­lence of the past but gloss­es over the most sin­is­ter aspects of it. Hei­di, unable to face the demons in her life, becomes con­sumed by the haunt­ing spec­tre of Salem’s vio­lent lega­cy. Her addic­tion doesn’t serve as a metaphor, but rather a symp­tom of fac­ing the real self. Heidi’s sobri­ety faced her with a real­i­ty she wasn’t ready to face or accept.

The dis­com­fort elicit­ed by these nar­ra­tives con­nects with a reluc­tance to accept social rights move­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly Black Lives Mat­ter, which chal­lenge the con­cep­tion of America’s past and present. In seek­ing to address sys­tem­at­ic sys­tems of vio­lence and oppres­sion, Black Lives Mat­ters has sought to erase the idea that racism is a thing of the past. Instead, they address how the overt vio­lence of the his­to­ry has con­tributed to a frac­tured and bro­ken Amer­i­can psy­che, which per­pet­u­ates and eras­es cul­pa­bil­i­ty in con­tem­po­rary soci­ety. To work towards fix­ing issues fac­ing African-Amer­i­cans, first, the soci­ety must acknowl­edge and even accept this real­i­ty which chal­lenges the Amer­i­can Dream.

In Let Me In, the US remake of 2008’s Let the Right One In, direc­tor Matt Reeves recon­tex­tu­alis­es the Swedish nar­ra­tive to small-town New Mex­i­co and sets the tone by way of Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech, zero­ing in on this cru­cial phrase: There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scrip­ture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. Our nation, too, has a lega­cy of evil with which it must deal.” The han­dling of this speech is iron­ic as Rea­gan has long been a fig­ure­head in Amer­i­can his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism by way of mis­placed nos­tal­gia for the past but the words are still meant to ring true as an imper­a­tive need­ed for Amer­i­can soci­ety to change and evolve.

This idea is present in a num­ber of hor­ror films that sim­i­lar­ly posi­tion the mon­strous respon­si­bil­i­ty of the gov­ern­ment, such as in The Cab­in in the Woods or The Purge. These two films at least sug­gest the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the ide­o­log­i­cal con­cept of Amer­i­ca as a free and moral soci­ety is a lie in place to main­tain the sta­tus quo. Oth­er movies such as The House of the Dev­il, Ti West’s satanist throw­back hor­ror sug­gest by way of evok­ing mass hys­te­ria of the past as a self-per­pet­u­at­ing lie about America’s inno­cence. By evok­ing the Satan­ic Pan­ic of the late 1970s and 1980s, Ti West posi­tions the Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty as one unwill­ing and unable to face their own fail­ures as they des­per­ate­ly seek to trans­plant the dark­ness inside on an evil out­side force.

These films don’t posi­tion evil as some­thing that must (or even can be defeat­ed). When dark­ness has become a part of you, you can only expel it along with part of your­self, if at that. Look­ing back at the lega­cy of Obama’s pres­i­den­cy by way of hor­ror cin­e­ma, the chal­lenges of rein­ter­pret­ing the Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty are explored by way of rep­re­sent­ing the cycli­cal pat­terns of vio­lence and injus­tice. Most of these films sim­i­lar­ly posi­tion the hor­ror as open-end­ed and unre­solved, per­pet­u­at­ing dread via their lack of clo­sure. These films are not just about the nation­al­ist lies, but the lies we tell ourselves.

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