The Highway Horror Film

Bernice M. Murphy

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137391193
• eBook ISBN: 9781137391209
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

The Highway Horror Film argues that 'Highway Horror' is a hither-to overlooked sub-genre of the American horror movie. In these films, the American landscape is by its very accessibility rendered terrifyingly hostile, and encounters with other travellers almost always have sinister outcomes.

1

‘I Almost Drove Right Past’: Motels and Highway Horror

Abstract: This chapter argues that Psycho (1960) is a foundational text in the Highway Horror sub-genre. The emergence of the ‘Motel’ as a new kind of roadside business is discussed, as are the reasons why the location is often associated with criminality. The difference between the way in which motels and hotels are depicted in horror cinema is considered. Murphy discusses films such as Psycho, Vacancy (2007), and The Helpers (2012) in which guests are subjected to violence at the hands of sinister employees. The focus on surveillance technology seen in Vacancy and Bug (2006) is related to post-9/11 anxieties. The depiction of the motel as a place in which individual identity can become fragmented is explored in relation to Identity (2003) and Bug.

Keywords: criminality; identity; motels; psycho; surveillance

Murphy, Bernice M. The Highway Horror Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137391209.0004.

Around 30 minutes into the running time of Psycho (1960), we find ourselves on a California highway at night. Like many a cinematic outlaw before and since, Marion Crane has packed her bags and taken to the road: her objective, the home-town of her debt-ridden lover Sam Loomis. Her automobility gives independence, and the freedom to drive to and from work, but also the ability to rapidly leave town once she has decided to steal the loathsome Mr Cassidy’s cash deposit. Like another impulsive unmarried woman in her early thirties, Shirley Jackson’s doomed neurotic Eleanor Vance (from The Haunting of Hill House [1959]), Marion Crane would have lived if she had never learned to drive.¹ After all, it is the highway that brings her straight to the Bates Motel, one of the most paradigmatic ‘terrible places’ in American horror cinema.²

In the decades since the release of Psycho, the motel just off the main highway has often been depicted in the American popular imagination as a place in which unwary travellers are subjected to hideous acts of violence. If these films tell us anything, it is that ‘Places of sanctuary are prone to catastrophic inversion, to becoming demonic places, spaces of objection, derangement, violence and horror’.³ The roadside ‘stopping places’ discussed here remind us of Derrida’s observation that the Latin root of the word ‘hospitality’ is ‘... of a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carried its own contradiction incorporated into it, ... “hostility,” the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbours as the self-contradiction in its own body ...)’.⁴ The very name ‘motel’ even emphasises the relationship between lodging place and road which helps make the motel-set horror film such an important variety of highway horror film: the term is a compound word coming from the descriptor ‘motoring hotel’, coined in 1925.⁵ In this opening chapter I will therefore discuss the depiction of the motel in American horror film, paying particular attention to the ways in which the random acts of violence and disintegrating identities which feature in these films replicate the most notable thematic concerns of Highway Horror more generally. In addition to Psycho, the films considered here will include The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Identity (2006), Bug (2006), Vacancy (2007) and The Helpers (2012).

Marion Crane’s journey from Phoenix to California is one that Alfred Hitchcock insisted be depicted with as much fidelity as possible. One crew member recollected, ‘ “He wanted to know the exact route a woman might take to go from Phoenix to central California. We traced the route and took pictures of every area along the way” ’.⁶ This effort to accurately depict Marion’s drive not only emphasises the significance of the road trip element of the film, but also increases our sense of identification with her, making the shock of her death all the more profound. The woman whose longing for change has manifested itself in her flight to the highways will soon be murdered by a man whose life on the verge of a seldom-travelled road is one of isolation, stagnation and insanity.

In a trope often seen in the Highway Horror film, the confines of the car act as an echo chamber for Marion’s most neurotic imaginings. Hitchcock heightens this tension by keeping a tight close-up on Janet Leigh’s face whenever she is behind the wheel and by dramatising Marion’s panicky interior monologue. She has been alone with her thoughts for too long (a plight ironically echoed in that of her murderer-to-be), and the cracks are beginning to show. Her mental state is as fraught as Bernard Hermann’s desperately insistent score, which is the sound of ‘primordial dread’.⁷ Just as Marion finally begins to near her destination, she is blinded by heavy rain, and by the headlights of oncoming traffic. Suddenly, her car slows down, and the score comes to an abrupt stop. All we hear for a moment is the rattle of the rain as it ricochets off the windshield – until, gradually materialising into view, the neon sign advertising the Bates Motel can be seen. Marion’s decision to stop is an impulsive act borne out of physical and mental exhaustion. Had she not accidentally ‘gotten off the main road’, she would have reached Sam’s hometown in 30 minutes. In the end, it is mere chance that brings her to the Bates Motel. Her roadside safe haven is in fact a death trap. It is what would become a familiar trope. Citing Psycho as a prime example, Clarke observes that in popular cinema, ‘... stopping places are where things go awry. In such films, everything would have been all right if the protagonist had not taken a wrong turning’.⁸

As outlined in the Introduction, the establishment of the Interstate Highway System first of all affected the landscape in that it created millions of miles of new road across the nation – ribbons of asphalt that ‘... today dominate the landscape, seeming to tame nature itself as ribbons of concrete scale mountain ranges and cross miles of waterways’.⁹ Accompanying these changes was the establishment of a new breed of road-side business. One of the most significant commercial opportunities to emerge in the aftermath of the initial phases of American car culture (during the 1920s and ‘30s) was the gas station. The first was opened in New York as early as 1901; by 1967, there were 211, 473.¹⁰ The ominous encounter at the isolated rural gas station is one of the stock situational tropes of the backwoods horror film, but as we shall see during the course of this study, they also feature frequently in the Highway Horror film. Other businesses associated with the pre- and post-World War II automobility included diners, garages (often amalgamated with gas stations), drive-in movie theatres and fast-food outlets – all of them proof that ‘Since World War II, the American people have experienced a transformation of the man-made environment around them. Commercial, residential, and industrial structures have been redesigned to fit the needs of the motorist rather than the pedestrian’.¹¹ All of these business feature regularly in Highway Horror, but none as frequently as the motel, one of the most ubiquitous examples of the new ‘drive-in’ culture.

By 1950, ‘America had entered the age of the motel’.¹² It was a process which had begun a generation previously. In 1916, the Federal Aid Road Act inaugurated the Lincoln Highway, the first hard-surfaced coast-to-coast highway; by 1925, the first National Highway system was a work in progress. This, in conjunction with the arrival of the relatively affordable motor vehicles, ‘made possible the utilisation of the roads to an extent and in ways never before possible in the history of the human race’.¹³ The earliest lodging facilities specifically intended for America’s motorists consisted of free camping grounds established by enterprising farmers and landowners. After that came tourist cabins and cottages.¹⁴ The position of these early ‘autocamps’ outside of the centre of towns and cities enabled them to avoid traffic jams during busy periods. Land on the outskirts of town was also cheaper, and businesses constructed there less likely to attract the attention of the authorities.¹⁵

Though the term ‘motel’ was not in common use before the Second World War, by the end of the conflict, ‘the majority of cabins, cottages, courts, camps and roadside villas either tacked the name ‘Motel’ on to their own name or used it as a generic description’.¹⁶ During the 1920s and ‘30s, the motel achieved an increasingly prominent position in the national landscape. Jakle et al. argue for its central role in helping to facilitate the intense geographical mobility that characterises modern America:

Travellers on commercial rounds, movers shifting residents, tourists on vacation, conferees attending meetings – all require convenient, functional, and secure lodging, and a hospitality industry has evolved to provide it. Our modern nation would be difficult to imagine without motels, a fact forcefully reflected in their nearly ubiquitous presence in the American landscape. Motels break down parochialism by connecting isolated places to one another and to worlds beyond. They promote homogenisation.¹⁷

One factor that distinguished the pre-war motel from the post-war motel was that most of those built before the 1950s were run by small-business owner/operators who lived in and ran their own establishments. ‘It was easy to become a motel keeper. Virtually all you needed was a few thousand dollars, and a tract of farmland on the outskirts of town; and since operating overheads could be kept low by Pa acting as a room clerk, cashier and general handyman, while Ma was the maid of all work, in many respects running a motel was better than working a job’.¹⁸ During the 1930s, the FHA (the Federal Housing Administration, which would later play a key role in facilitating mass suburbanisation) actively encouraged ‘entrepreneurs to finance their plans for cabin cottages with no down payment’.¹⁹ As a result, ‘... eager roadside dwellers jumped on the gravy train and reached longingly for their own slice of the American Dream’.²⁰

The fact that many motels before the war were run by small-time owner/operators is significant because it is exactly this kind of business which always features in the motel-based Highway Horror film. None of these films is set in an establishment run by one of the vast corporations which since the 1960s have operated most US motels, for the simple reason that the activities which take place in these narratives could happen only in establishments with no external oversight. In the old-style motel, ‘the cabin or autocamp was a personal affair and the owner was responsible for everything that went on there’.²¹ The idea that the motel is a ‘personal’ or a ‘family’ affair takes on sinister meaning in the many narratives in which unlucky travellers find themselves subject to the attentions of employees or proprietors who have been able to get away with murder.

It didn’t take long for there to emerge an association in the popular mindset between ‘geographical mobility, motels, and illicit behaviour’.²² Sexual mores changed rapidly during the 1920s and ’30s, and ‘motels were viewed by some as potential sites for immorality ... the link between sex and the automobile involved many questions of r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Bumps in the Road: Defining the Highway Horror Film
• 1  I Almost Drove Right Past: Motels and Highway Horror
• 2  That Truck Driver Tried to Kill Me! The Highway Nemesis Narrative
• 3  Lets Go for a Ride, Otis: Serial Killers in the Highway Horror Film
• 4  They Never Even Saw It Coming: The Fatal Car Crash in the Highway Horror Film
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index