Monster Stories/Storied Monsters

This final chapter continues the discussion of monsters by engaging with the writings of Robin Wood, who theorized monsters as fundamentally ambivalent figures who allow us to envision alternatives to the restrictive social order. It then realigns Wood’s terms to show how the recent horror genre has been structured around questions not simply of monstrosity, but of asserting or maintaining humanity—and recognizing the humanity of others—in the face of monstrosity and other inconceivable horrors. This is the explicit theme of The Walking Dead TV series, as is emphasized in its first video game adaptation, The Walking Dead: The Game (2012), but is there at the beginnings of the modern genre in the 1960s with a film like Night of the Living Dead (1968). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understandings of “monstrosity” and “humanity” are redefined around questions of morality with two high-profile, integrated horror films, Get Out (2017) and The Shape of Water (2017).

Epilogue

The epilogue takes stock of the current genre by continuing the look at Get Out and The Shape of Water and fellow 2017 horror film blockbuster It. Focusing on the emblematic images of each film’s marketing campaign, the epilogue analyses the different valences and emphases of each: on the visceral provocations of the sensational address (It), on the depiction and exploration of fear and abjection (Get Out), and on the appeal of monsters and monstrosity (The Shape of Water). This allows for the epilogue to chart out the primary forms of horror in a contemporary genre that has been shaped in equal parts by film, television, and video games, with increasing contributions from new media and internet-based forms. The book has focused on convergence of the genre across mediums, and it closes with a suggestion that the future of the genre lies in a convergence of these forms. that, although the marketing for each of these films suggests an emphasis on sensation or a specific aspect of narrative, the films themselves suggest an increasing comfort with balance these different approaches that had once been thought of as mutually exclusive. In the digital era, new mediums increasingly balance direct, often sensational, aims with narrative depth, and so a medium like virtual reality may find horror to be an ideal model.

Monsters, and the Viewers Who Love Them

This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the themes of horror hold fascination for viewers and gamers when not paired with visceral affective goals. The chapter theorizes this mode as “integrated horror”—works that incorporate horror tropes into existing narrative forms and structures—with recent television at the forefront of this trend. Integrated horror allows for exploration of, and familiarization with, monsters and monstrosity, of death and abjection. This mode allows viewers and gamers to conceive of and, in some sense, work through, the inconceivable fears that define horror. This chapter discusses the uses of monsters and why we embrace them over the course of the dozens or hundreds of hours that make up a television show like The Walking Dead (2010–) and American Horror Story (2011–).

Introduction

In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, and internet-based forms as central to moving-image horror as is the cinema—and, further, the form and style of horror moves between mediums. This chapter establishes the current transmedial nature of moving-image horror by analyzing two recent films, Unfriended (2015) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). These films eschew traditional cinematic editing and camerawork in favor of a style and structure consisting of browsing, messaging, and other networked communications taking place on a single laptop screen. This chapter also introduces the book structure that centers around a movement from sensation to narrative—aesthetics of emergence and of absorption or immersion—from works that are almost exclusively shock-based to those whose interest in the genre is firmly entrenched in telling complex absorbing stories about monsters.

The Blackest Eyes . . . The Devil’s Eyes

Chapter 3 refines the discussion of the sensational address and horror spectatorship by analyzing the first-person camerawork that I dub “Killer POV.” Killer POV—a subjective camera without a reverse shot—is at the center of many of the most influential writings on modern horror. However, these discussions often start from the assumption that the camera’s point of view produces identification with the unseen killers or monsters whose perspectives we presume to be represented. This chapter attempts to disengage our understanding of horror spectatorship from such models to provide an alternative reading of Killer POV that engages with the genre’s structures of looking and being looked at while remaining sensitive to what precisely is being communicated to viewers by these shots. Killer POV signals to the viewer the presence of a threat without displaying the killer onscreen. This chapter reads Killer POV through the lens of the sensational address, understanding it in terms of its effects on the spectator. In this reading, Killer POV does not elicit fantasies of mastery and control, but, rather, separates the dominating, sadistic look of the killer from the viewer’s powerless look at Killer POV.

I’M SCREEEEEEEEAMING!!!!

Chapter 2 looks at jump scares and the fad of “screamers” found across the internet: brief videos or gifs designed to cause an unsuspecting browser to scream and jump. They appeared when jump scares were ascendant within the horror genre thanks to video games; screamers’ online popularity led to importation into the cinema through films such as the Paranormal Activity series. The chapter develops the importance of shock to the horror genre and the similarities between engagement across mediums. Shock is a challenge to viewer/browser/gamer mastery and self-control. Screamers offer the opportunity to reassert one’s own self through repetition and sharing, showing how similar processes are central to the experience of horror film viewing and gameplay. It discusses “elevated horror” and the tendency to disparage sensation in opposition to traditional virtues of narrative cinema. The chapter’s counterpoint for this assumption is with close readings of “elevated” horror films, The Witch (2015) and The Babadook (2014).

The Monster Function

Chapter 5 begins the second part of the book, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).” Whereas the first part focused on the sensational address and direct stimulation of the horror viewer, gamer, and browser, the second half focuses on monsters. This chapter argues for understanding monsters as figures that embody and limit anxieties, and which therefore offer reassuring locations onto which those anxieties can be placed. This argument places the monster-centric “philosophy of horror” of Noel Carroll in dialogue with the explicitly unembodied theory of abjection of Julia Kristeva to understand the importance of this embodiment and limitation to traditional horror: horror is a vehicle for working through anxieties that otherwise are not, or cannot, be articulated. The chapter first establishes the extent to which monstrosity is an essentially formal category—decided by stylistic presentation as much as by biological make-up. It then performs close readings of three recent works that engage with this tradition of monstrous forms to minimize visualization and embodiment and, therefore, the monster function: It Follows (2014), the Paranormal Activity series of films (2007–2015), and the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010).

The Blackest Eyes . . . The Devil’s Eyes

This chapter analyzes the recent development in first-person camerawork in horror, in which the killer-aligned camera of Killer POV has been supplanted by the victim- or protagonist-aligned cameras of “found footage”—and in the realm of gaming, first-person shooters (FPS). Where Killer POV communicates the owner’s mastery over the objects of their look, this “searching camera” indicates vulnerability and inadequacy, and the chapter looks to a long history of writing about documentary cinematography to theorize the connection between handheld camerawork, and the body of the camera operator. An FPS game like Left 4 Dead (2008), however, pairs that feeling of vulnerability and an always-partial view of its zombie-filled landscape with action and the ability to combat the threats surrounding the players. In [REC] (2007) and [REC] 2 (2009), the camera operator is always placed in a position of impotence, and an inability to act. The chapter closes by examining a recent trend in horror gaming, which equates powerlessness with horror. So games like P.T. (2014), Layers of Fear (2016), and Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul (2017) pair an FPS-like first-person interface with an inability to directly attack or defend against the threats that populate the diegesis.

Shocks to the System

This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the construction of mise-en-scène around the provocation of the viewer/gamer. It builds off of the tradition of theorizing horror film spectatorship to show the commonalities between horror film viewing and playing horror games—using trailers depicting audience reactions to Paranormal Activity (2007–2009) and Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) as well as reaction videos made about horror games—to analyze the effects of a sensational, physical engagement with the screen. It argues for a fundamentally ludic understanding of horror film spectatorship that places the viewing activity of the horror film spectator and the active “entanglement” of the horror gamer on a spectrum of interactivity. This chapter proposes an understanding of horror as an engagement with the inconceivable, with things we fear but cannot fully comprehend. Sensational horror translates that feeling of inconceivable horror into visceral, physical experience.