Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [38]
BY TURNING toward real-world worries such as real estate, childbirth, and going to the city on your own, the New Horror provides an outlet to indulge anxieties in the anonymity of a dark theater before laughing at your fear on the way home. These movies began with countercultural attacks on authority and a rejection of the frivolity of fantasy, but by the seventies, their sensibility was changing to reflect the darkening tone of youth culture. They reflected the grievances of their time: paranoia about government power and mocking nihilism about the power of the American dream. They invited audiences to distrust authority and, most of all, to steer clear of the outside world. Those aliens are not friendly. And scientists who want to save the world have ulterior motives. Bad things happen in the city, or the country, or wherever else you do not live.
Horror, many defenders argue, provides a catharsis. You see this argument clarified in extreme circumstances, such as times of great tragedy. Before his second tour of duty in Iraq, an American soldier named Adam Bryant told me that horror movies were particularly popular among the military abroad. He said most of his chain of command owned Eli Roth’s Hostel, but it’s telling how soldiers who had seen the most graphic of terrors in person reacted to torture porn.
We saw Hostel in an air base in Balad when we were I guess you would say taking a breather. And we were driving in our Humvee and we drove past a kind of makeshift theater that was built and I had seen pictures of Hostel and read about it online. So we stopped off and watched it. During a lot of the torture scenes I would look around to see the reactions and a lot of people were horrified turning their heads and looking at the ground. When the DVD came out we were at the air base and naturally I bought it. I brought it back to the [Forward Operating Base] that night and a friend of mine came in during the scene when the girl got her eye cut out. He covered his mouth and walked out. This is the same guy who has seen a lot of shit over there.
As Bryant describes it, the soldiers were visibly disgusted by the movie and then they went out and bought it. “We know what’s real and what’s pretend,” he explains. And since in the real world, a good soldier is not supposed to panic and turn away when confronted by death, the movies provide catharsis. This position assumes the audience identifies with the victims, but Hitchcock famously puts the audience on the side of the killer in Psycho and repeatedly in the position of the voyeur. He was hardly the first.
If audiences were identifying with killers, then how does that change our understanding of horror? One disturbing conclusion that received a boost with the popularizing of Freudian analysis of dreams is that scary movies allow audiences to express their repressed sinful thoughts through the monster. We like movies about killing because on some subconscious level we want to kill. If that is the case, then these films indulge sadistic tendencies.
The tension between the sadistic and masochistic appeals of horror was reflected in the divide between Cunningham and Craven. The producer saw Last House as an escape, an outlet for some dormant pain. As it happens, he also knew that allowing the audience to feel like a monster could make some money. But Craven, raised in an evangelical household, had a much deeper feel for the allure of self-sacrifice, of seeing abuse and brutality as transcendent. When people went to church, they were not merely escaping pain. They were brave enough to confront it, and that gave them a certain feeling of triumph. The trick was to find what scares could trigger a response from a secular audience