New Blood

Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror

Eddie Falvey, Jonathan Wroot, Joe Hickinbottom, Eddie Falvey, Jonathan Wroot, Joe Hickinbottom

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786836366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The taste for horror is arguably as great today as it has ever been. Since the turn of the millennium, the horror genre has seen various developments emerging out of a range of contexts, from new industry paradigms and distribution practices to the advancement of subgenres that reflect new and evolving fears. New Blood builds upon preceding horror scholarship to offer a series of critical perspectives on the genre since the year 2000, presenting a collection of case studies on topics as diverse as the emergence of new critical categories (such as the contentiously named 'prestige horror'), new subgenres (including 'digital folk horror' and 'desktop horror') and horror on-demand ('Netflix horror'), and including analyses of key films such as The Witch and Raw and TV shows like Stranger Things and Channel Zero. Never losing sight of the horror genre's ongoing political economy, New Blood is an exciting contribution to film and horror scholarship that will prove to be an essential addition to the shelves of researchers, students and fans alike.

1

Apprehension Engines

The New Independent ‘Prestige Horror’

David Church

UNEARTHLY DRONES, metallic whines and ominous clanks emanate from a contraption consisting of several wooden boxes with a guitar-like neck, onto which are affixed magnets, metal wires and coils, and a hurdy-gurdy crank (Figure 1.1). The ‘Apprehension Engine’ is the nickname for this unique musical instrument, commissioned by Mark Korven, composer of The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015), and designed/built by guitar maker Tony Duggan-Smith. As its name suggests, the foreboding ambience created by this device is intended to instil anxiety and dread via eldritch sounds that cannot be easily associated with conventional musical instruments or arrangements. Inspired by his score for The Witch, Korven commissioned this experimental instrument to lend his film scores a more original sound than the overused digital samples previously at his disposal.¹ Both the ethos and the effects of this device provide a useful way to approach a new breed of independently produced horror films that merge art-cinema style with decentred genre tropes, privileging lingering dread and visual restraint over audio-visual shock and monstrous disgust. As ‘apprehension engines’ in their own right, these films represent ‘a new-wave horror that diverges from the assembly line and strays from overpitched archetypes’, sharing with Korven and Duggan-Smith’s instrument a sense of handmade artistry, low-budget ingenuity and striking originality – all in the service of producing affective tones that unsettle both viewers and the genre itself.²

The recent rise to prominence of films such as It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014), The Witch, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (Osgood Perkins, 2015), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (Osgood Perkins, 2016), It Comes at Night (Trey Edward Shults, 2017) and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) is among the horror genre’s most widely discussed recent developments. Variously dubbed ‘prestige horror’, ‘indie horror’, ‘smart horror’, ‘quiet horror’, ‘elevated horror’ and ‘post-horror’, all emerged from the crucible of major film festivals like Sundance and Toronto with significant critical buzz for supposedly transcending the horror genre’s oft-presumed lowbrow status. Heralded for possessing an aesthetically higher tone than the average multiplex horror film, these films have received disproportionate critical acclaim for catering to more rarefied tastes, even as casual viewers and even some horror fans have proved more ambivalent towards these films’ aesthetic strategies. In this chapter, however, I will engage most prominently with the films’ critical nomination as ‘prestige horror’, since this particular nomenclature helps us not only to situate them within a longer history of horror texts that have seemingly risen above the genre’s disrepute, but also marks them off as a different development due to so many of these films originating from the independent production/ distribution market during a close cluster of years.

Film critics have deemed various productions ‘prestige’ in earlier periods of horror film history, usually based on some combination of high production values, the presence of an established auteur or major star, or an adaptation from middlebrow, often literary source material. Some of the more canonical horror films – including Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1990), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) and The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) – emerged from such industrial and publicity strategies. In many cases, critics claimed these films to be oriented more towards ‘adult’ viewers than the genre’s dominant reputation as juvenilia, more attuned to the pleasures of female viewers or worthy of participation by above-the-line personnel who might ‘elevate’ such an otherwise lowly genre.³ Overall, the ‘prestigeness’ of horror has generally been constructed against the monolithic image of relatively young, male, uncouth viewership. This is not to say, of course, that prestige horror films are bereft of shock value or have enjoyed unanimously positive critical reception – witness Michael Powell’s career implosion for directing Peeping Tom (1960) or the various controversies about lewd and sacrilegious imagery in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), for instance – but that the above qualities of prestige-ness frequently serve as mitigating factors against negative criticism. And importantly, most of these earlier films predominantly obey classical narrative conventions, not the qualities of art cinema seen in the new wave of independent ‘prestige horror’. By occupying a stylistic position closer to ‘difficult’ art cinema than populist genre cinema, yet being marketed and released to multiplexes as potential crossover films, the new prestige horror offers wider audiences an expanded view of what the horror film can feel like, but – as Rotten Tomatoes reviews and CinemaScore audience polls reveal – at the cost of potentially alienating many of the genre’s quotidian viewers.

Figure 1.1. Mark Korven’s ‘Apprehension Engine’. Photograph, Kai Korven.

Minimalist art-horror

Horror cinema has long been a consistently popular but critically denigrated genre, often derided for its corporeal appeals, fantastical conceits and thematic focus on evil, monstrosity and death. Accordingly, it is a critical commonplace for reviewers to celebrate horror texts that privilege haunting atmospheres and indirect chills over shocking spectacles and visceral disgust. Joan Hawkins has argued that, despite the cultural stratification of tastes that privilege cognition over bodily sensations, art films trade in many of the same capacities to shock, disgust and offend as horror films – albeit framed for supposedly different purposes (e.g. symbolism over literalism). For Hawkins, then, ‘art-horror’ films represent a key site for levelling the taste hierarchies between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.⁴ Although Hawkins is primarily interested in comparing the shock effect of taboo spectacle and avant-garde distanciation, she also notes how an art-horror film’s ‘affective properties tend to be divorced from its “artistic” and “poetic” ones, so that it’s difficult to find a critical language that allows us to speak about the film as a whole’.⁵ Hence, even when horror films bear the more subtle qualities of art cinema, as outlined by David Bordwell – including drifting and open-ended narratives, ambiguous and psychologically complex characters, and spatial/temporal manipulation (e.g. continuity violations, durational realism)⁶ – critics often downplay such traits in order to preserve the hierarchies that keep the horror genre near the bottom of the ladder of cultural taste.

The new wave of prestige horror films exhibits many of the artcinema traits noted by Bordwell, but without so many of the genre’s critically countervailing traits like graphic violence/gore, unrealistic monsters and so on. Indeed, these films’ difference from the mainstream horror film is primarily one of tone. As Douglas Pye argues, a film’s tone resides in how its dramatic content is stylistically conveyed via the construction of an overall mood that shapes our affective horizon as viewers. For Pye, tone can register through a film’s apparent generic or formal/stylistic distance from established norms – and is especially apparent when alternative uses of film form unsettle our conventional ways of approaching generic material.⁷ Stylistically, these particular horror films favour minimalism over maximalism, eschewing jump scares, frenetic editing and energetic and/or handheld cinematography in favour of cold and distanced shot framing, longer-than-average shot durations, slow camera movements and unhurried narrative pacing. This tendency towards a ‘vulnerable stillness’ increases the viewer’s dread that something might occur at any moment, affectively stretching out the temporal experience of the film.⁸ In It Follows, for instance, David Robert Mitchell uses slow 360-degree pans, static long shots and slow zooms that allow the viewer to share the protagonist’s paranoid searching of her visual field for a perpetually approaching monster that can take anyone’s form, while The Witch presents interiors as chiaroscuro tableaux and exteriors as distanced vistas where even a waving tree branch conjures supernatural fears among its family of early American colonists. As critics observe, these films avoid ‘the annoying modern tendency towards wobblicam and over-editing’ and ‘don’t fit neatly into the “rising action, jump scare, rinse, repeat” model’ of mainstream Hollywood horror.⁹

In many respects, these stylistic choices recall the American ‘smart films’ described by Jeffrey Sconce as an ‘indie’ aesthetic developed in the late 1990s that favours ‘long-shots, static composition, and sparse editing’ to suggest a hip, ironic distance from white, middle-class conformity and the ‘horrors of life under advanced capitalism’.¹⁰ Although film-makers like Todd Solondz, Paul Thomas Anderson and Alexander Payne used this style to produce a quirky or dark comedic tone, Todd Haynes’s deadly serious Safe (1995) perhaps comes closest to evoking the nebulously defined (and possibly imagined) threats, the overwhelming dread and the narrative ambiguity seen in the new prestige horror films. Their visual style and slow pace thus suggest a cool and ironic distance from conventional horror tropes themselves, as though the film-makers are visually signalling the space they wish to occupy between the art/indie film and the mainstream Hollywood horror film. After all, these are not ‘smart’ horror films in the winking sense of humorously oversaturated references to genre conventions – see the heavily allusive intertextuality of ‘smart’ meta-horror films like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994), Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012) or The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) – and hence they seem less blatantly indebted to popular horror cinema for direct inspiration. That is, these latter films use self-reflexivity to ‘smartly’ play with the genre’s more tired conventions. By contrast, Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) has been critically dubbed a ‘smart’ horror film less for playing with long-time conventions (though it does that as well) than for using the horror genre as a timely platform to ‘smartly’ intervene in American racial-equality debates during the Black Lives Matter era – albeit remaining a more populist intervention by evincing fewer of the art-film stylistics that mark the new prestige horror films under discussion here.

Confirming Hawkins’s argument, critics often highlight the poetic and dream-like qualities of such films, while typically downplaying the more visceral moments. For instance, I Am the Pretty Thing is described as ‘a tone poem’, ‘almost pornographic in its portent, every second of it seductive and ripe with tension, promising money shots that never come’,¹¹ while a representative review of The Blackcoat’s Daughter observes, ‘To call the story a slow burn would be a mischaracterisation of the word slow. It’s more like a meditation or a waking nightmare, the kind you’re not actually sure is a dream at all until it’s over and you’re safe again.’¹² Of course, not all films critically ascribed to the new wave of prestige horror share all of these stylistic traits, nor are these traits wholly new or exclusive to the films clustered beneath that banner. Told from the perspective of a female-presenting extraterrestrial who seduces and consumes unsuspecting men, Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) shares the hypnotically languid pace, long shot durations and unsettling musical score of many of the new prestige horror films, albeit in a more science-fiction context. Meanwhile, The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) and Get Out bear a less minimalistic style than It Follows or The Witch, but close temporal proximity to the latter’s critical and commercial success has sometimes caused the former to be retrospectively lumped in with them. By contrast, The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015), Don’t Breathe (Fede Álvarez, 2016) and mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017) initially share their claustrophobic ambience and shortage of jump scares, but eventually turn towards faster, actionoriented pacing in their final acts. Likewise, House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009) predated many of these films but foreshadows their atmospheric restraint, its frequent comparison to the films of John Carpenter another common motif in critical praise for the new prestige horror. Nevertheless, I would posit that the films most often identified as the core examples of new prestige horror bear a distinctly slow, austere and minimalist style for their duration.

Although these films occupy established horror subgenres (ghostly hau...