The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  I never thought this needed to be said, but this seems as good a place as any to reiterate that just because a person loves fictitious violence, that person does not necessarily enjoy—or even have the capacity to tolerate—the real thing. I realize this is only anecdotal, but I’ve experienced literally every type of on-screen cruelty, yet seeing someone in actual pain, however minor, still has a profound effect on me. When our son was born, we opted to have him circumcised in the hospital by an actual doctor, rather than at home in the traditional Jewish ritual of a bris. Because my wife was still recovering from her C-section and had no desire to watch anyway, I held my infant son’s tiny hand during the procedure. Or at least I tried to. After the doctor secured him and sterilized the area, the next thing I remember is being wheeled back into my wife’s recovery room to shouts of, “Get him on the couch.” I had passed out cold. Now, maybe this episode proves nothing except that I’m an extraordinary softy when it comes to my own kids. But I like to think that it’s indicative of the horror community at large—all the bloodshed we’ve seen has not desensitized us, as the popular theory goes, but instead has made us more attuned to the suffering of others.

  Horror fans are generally such pacifists that at times it’s actually made me uncomfortable. For example, at some revival screening in the dark days right after 9/11, when even most conscientious objectors recognized the need to uproot the Taliban, the event’s hosts passed out buttons that read: “Bombs are NOT the Answer” and “An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everyone Blind.” As neither a Democrat nor a Republican—but certainly not a part of any of those lunatic-fringe parties either—nor a liberal or a conservative, most people assume I hold staunchly middle-of-the-road views. On the contrary, at the risk of sounding like a fanatic, most of my beliefs are either far left or far right. For example, I’m staunchly pro-choice. Well, more than staunchly. I’d estimate that if 75–80 percent of the people I come into contact with on a daily basis had been aborted we’d all be a lot better off. Plus, I can’t think of anything more ghoulish—literally, anything—than making a woman who was sexually assaulted carry her rapist’s baby to term. On the other end of the spectrum, I’m vehemently pro–death penalty. Right now, even in the most execution-friendly states, capital punishment is only reserved for the most heinous of murderers. I’d expand the list to include child molesters, serial domestic abusers, rapists, and people who pay with a check at the grocery store. This never occurred to me before, but I guess what it comes down to is that I’m really just pro-death. Especially because I’m also a firm believer in euthanasia. If someone, for whatever reason, wants to take that leap into the great beyond, I say good riddance.

  Pacifism, however, doesn’t preclude righteous indignation. And this is something the horror community has in spades.

  In the July 2011 issue of Rue Morgue, John W. Bowen, my favorite of all the magazine’s excellent writers, penned a piece that created quite a stir, at least in our little universe.

  In his monthly “It Came from Bowen’s Basement” column, he calls out some horror luminaries—Richard Matheson, William Friedkin, Brian De Palma, Karen Black—for their dismissal of the very genre that made them famous. I could spend this entire chapter deconstructing their reasoning and proving just how ill informed they are. Suffice it to say the quotes from each of them that Bowen supplies make them sound like absolute idiots. (Okay, I can’t resist Friedkin’s. Regarding The Exorcist: “It won ten Academy Award nominations. How can that be horror?”) But as Bowen in his own inimitable way writes, “This actually bothers me less, as Friedkin is infamous for being a tactless, abusive, egomaniacal douche, and this is far from the most offensive thing he’s ever said.”II

  Feeling their beloved genre was being disrespected, horror fans circled the wagons. They flooded message boards and wrote letters to the editor (of many different horror periodicals) in support of Bowen’s gripe. They heralded the few noble A-listers who embrace their horror past and chastised others who prefer to keep it in the closet. Fans also took issue with the mainstream’s ignorance of anything but the most high-profile horror films. For example, when Conan O’Brien once had Jennifer Connelly on as a guest, he showed a clip of Phenomena as a gag, to illustrate an early career misstep. Now, in all fairness, out of context—sometimes even in context—I can understand the unintentional humor of Phenomena. But for those who would carve Argento’s dour countenance into the stone of horror’s Mount Rushmore, it felt like a slap in the face. A cheap shot from someone who didn’t have the foggiest idea that Phenomena, while flawed, was also touched by genius.

  Logically, this anger seems misplaced. I mean, why should we—and by “we,” I mean the proverbial horror fans—give a shit what these people think? Matheson and Black are both dead, and Friedkin and De Palma are shells of their former selves (despite their comments about the genre, I’m still holding out hope that either one might have a little magic left). But we did care, at least as evidenced by the response to Bowen’s column. He unknowingly revealed an insecurity that I fear is all too prevalent in our community, and at the same time exposed a curious irony: we have an almost insatiable need for acceptance and yet profess not to care a lick about the very acceptance we seek.

  As a general rule, horror fans embrace their status as cultural outsiders. In fact, many define their identity solely by opposition to the mainstream. We tell ourselves we don’t need, or even want, casual endorsements—not from the public or the critics, and especially not from Hollywood suits. The contradiction though is that horror fans seem to be one of the most defensive and thin-skinned groups around. We’re so accustomed to being told that horror as a genre is terrible, infantile, less than serious, puerile, a waste of time, and an affront to culture and society that our knee-jerk reaction is to defend it at all costs.

  Sometimes this urge is appropriate.

  Just recently, in a Wall Street Journal review of Chain Saw Confidential, Gunnar Hansen’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre memoir, Christopher Bray writes about the film itself, “Whatever this movie is about, the fact remains that it is a shoddy and shamingly bad piece of work.” Say what you want about Chain Saw. Call it raw, visceral, disgusting, upsetting, disturbing, hallucinatory. But “shoddy” and “shamingly bad”? Fuck you. Chain Saw is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, not exactly a repository for incompetence.

  This is the same reviewer who attempts to compare hard-core horror and hard-core porn: “One seeks to titillate the adolescent mind, the other to terrify and torment it, but the two genres are premised on young people’s fascinated shame about their own bodies.” As someone who knows a lot more about both horror movies and pornography than Mr. Bray, I can safely say that this is nothing more than academic gobbledygook. Besides some of Cronenberg’s work, I can’t think of more than a handful of horror films that come close to fitting this criterion. And as for pornography, a good deal of my adolescence was spent trying to procure adult material, whether in the form of magazines, videos, or even dirty talk on 1-900 lines. I promise you, I was the furthest thing from ashamed about either my own body or my interest in other people’s. Curious, you bet your ass, but certainly not ashamed. Critics like Bray make these sweeping generalizations because it allows them to intellectualize something that can’t be intellectualized: the fact that people like to watch other people fuck.

  Far more insidious than fools like Bray are those who try to legitimize horror by pretending it’s something else. As if it’s not good enough to stand on its own, warts and all. A pet peeve of mine (and I have many) is the recent trend of referring to horror films as “genre films.” Part of it is the redundancy—all films are genre films, from The Godfather to Invasion of the Blood Farmers. Practically, this is about as helpful as calling a type of cuisine “ethnic,” as if there is no difference between a veal scallopini and a porridge made by some tribe in sub-Saharan Africa, which I bet you anything will soon become the hottest new item at Whole Foods.

  It’s the connotation t
hat I find so galling, the fact that “genre” is substituted because the user assumes that the term it’s replacing—in this case, “horror”—is in itself inherently pejorative. It’s the same reason I detest the adjective “urban” used as an alternative for “black.” And quite frankly, I don’t see how more African-Americans aren’t outraged, since in an effort to be PC people are making a gross (and totally false) generalization that all blacks live in cities. The NBC sitcom The Office skewers this brilliantly. In the season 4 episode “Local Ad,” clueless boss Michael Scott refers to Stanley, the lone African-American in the office, as “the key to our urban vibe.” Stanley looks up and replies, “I grew up in a small town. What about me seems urban to you?”

  Although I can’t pinpoint the first use of “genre” as a straightforward synonym for “horror,” I’m guessing it was probably by some distribution executive looking to gussy up his latest direct-to-video release. The sad thing is that by now, it’s practically become part of the vernacular, used even by devoted horror fans either oblivious to or unconcerned with the ramifications.

  And, sadly, I’ve found myself succumbing to this inferiority complex far too often. In Blood Money, Richard Nowell refers to Going to Pieces as a “fan-oriented publication.” Naturally, I took offense to his characterization of my book. After all, his insinuation was that by definition Going to Pieces was for the slasher fan, certainly not a work worthy of scholarly consideration. Again, it’s the old canard that for horror to be taken seriously we must pretend it’s something other than what it is. And by extension, for writings on the subject to be taken seriously, they must be geared to an audience far different from the rabble that actually likes the subject itself.

  But the more I thought about it, regardless of Nowell’s intent with his statement, he was absolutely correct. Of course Going to Pieces was written for the fans. For the kind of person who would never have been stumped by Ghostface. Who would brave a torrential downpour and a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitoes to attend a two a.m. screening of Sleepaway Camp at one of Chicago’s last remaining drive-ins. By contrast, Blood Money was written for the scholars and academics. I know I’ll never be close to the writer that Nowell is. In a lot of ways, that bothers me. In others, I actually think it’s a good thing. After all, I can barely get through a single page of his book without zoning out—and it’s a topic about which I’m passionate above all else. On a handful of other occasions, Nowell references Going to Pieces to illustrate a point. And even though it’s my own book, I have no idea what the fuck the guy is talking about. I’m reminded of a 1994 Playboy interview with Howard Stern. The interviewer asked him about a series of Doonesbury comics in which he’d recently appeared as a character, to which Stern replied, “I have never understood the comic pages of the newspaper . . . I don’t think any of them are funny, Doonesbury in particular. I don’t even know what the fuck Garry Trudeau is talking about. The guy writes a series of comics on me, and I don’t know what the fuck the joke is. I don’t get it.”III

  What is most ironic, and I would argue unfortunate, is that oftentimes the most fervent attacks on the genre come from within. Horror fans can be as demanding and tough to please—and I would even add nitpicky—as the worst Philadelphia Eagles supporters (for the non–sports folks, Philly fans are so awful that they famously booed Santa Claus). It’s axiomatic that the only thing America loves more than building up its heroes is tearing them down once they become too big. And the horror community, to be sure, is certainly not immune to this phenomenon.

  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the career of Eli Roth, who first came to the attention of horror fans thanks to his entertaining commentary on the late-nineties Troma release of Joel Reed’s Bloodsucking Freaks. Roth had been toiling in the entertainment industry for years, but once he exploded onto the scene it made for better copy to pretend he came out of nowhere. His 2003 film, Cabin Fever, about a group of campers ravaged by a flesh-eating virus, was made for less than $2 million and grossed just north of $21 million domestically. But it was his 2006 film, Hostel, which opened at number one at the box office and went on to earn more than $47 million, that really thrust him into the public consciousness. The story of a group of friends backpacking through Slovakia who stumble upon a criminal enterprise in which wealthy patrons can indulge their most sadistic fantasies, Hostel (along with Saw, released a year before) was deemed responsible for ushering in the subgenre colloquially known as “torture porn.” Film critic David Edelstein is usually credited with coining the phrase in a February 2006 article in New York magazine. However, I’ve found it used in an October 2005 article from the Guardian and then a few months later in the Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper, in reference to the Aussie slasher Wolf Creek.

  Naturally, critics loved this term, as it combined the two things guaranteed to engage viewers: sex and violence. They could also spit it out derisively, reaping the benefits of discussing it while allowing them to feel morally superior to those who enjoyed it. I, on the other hand, hated the term the first time I heard it. Some of it was jealousy. Previously, I had tried to coin a similarly descriptive one: “ArtGore.” It was both a play on the word “hard-core” and an attempt to indicate that gore can in fact be artistic. “ArtGore” never caught on as anything, much less a universal expression, partly because, having no platform to promote it, I told all of two people, but more importantly because it just wasn’t that clever.

  But mainly, “torture porn” (the term, not the subgenre) is reductive and negates Roth’s immense talent as a filmmaker.

  Now, admittedly, there’s more than a few reasons for the average horror fan to dislike Roth, none of which have anything to do with his films. He’s extremely good-looking and charismatic, he’s a shameless name-dropper (especially about his friendship with Tarantino), and he’s slept with more than his fair share of young ingénues.

  Even before Hostel: Part II, Roth’s equally well-made and even more beautiful-looking sequel that pretty much just substituted the male backpackers of the original for a trio of girls, the backlash began. Once horror’s enfant terrible, Roth delighted in a balls-to-the-wall violence that was seen as no longer an asset but a detriment. The Saw series experienced a similar phenomenon. The difference was that there was no single person set up as the fall guy, mainly because there was no single person identified with the series: James Wan only directed the first installment; Darren Lynn Bousman was too nondescript and Leigh Whannell too likeable.

  This made Roth a convenient target. And this would have been fine if the criticism had come from the usual suspects who took every opportunity to disparage the genre. Romero had endured it. Carpenter, Craven, and Hooper had endured it. Roth could endure it too. But, instead, the barbs came from the people who should have known better. In half the interviews I read with filmmakers who have made a movie filled with graphic uncomfortable violence, the director will inevitably state his desire to create something more than “just a Hostel clone.” The irony is that Hostel is still a smarter and much better film than 99.9 percent of those made by people who shudder at the comparison.

  It’s not just Roth, or even torture porn in general, that is attacked as soon as it becomes too successful. Every subgenre is fair game. Pick up any horror magazine and read the interviews. Watch how the directors try to differentiate their films from the competition. “It’s smarter than the typical slasher.” “Our film doesn’t rely on jump scares.” “Blood and graphic gore grow old quickly.” And the worst of all, “It’s really more of a psychological thriller.” Director Jason Eisener came onto the scene with his 2011 exploitationer, the Rutger Hauer starrer Hobo with a Shotgun. It’s vintage Carpenter by way of Troma. Hobo garnered tons of positive press and a Rue Morgue cover story. Based at least in part on this success, Eisener became involved with the V/H/S films, lo-fi anthologies that jettisoned the yucks of Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt for piss-your-pants frights. In an article about V/H/S/2 in the August 2013 issue of Fangoria, Eisen
er says, “There’s so much shit in the Paranormal Activity movies where they’re just filming random stuff. It doesn’t do anything for the characters; they bore you, bore you, bore you until something flutters in the curtain and you’re like, ‘Ohh!’ because something is finally happening.” Is Eisener entitled to his opinion? Of course. But he didn’t need to disparage what I consider the most frightening modern-day horror franchise in order to prove the worth of his film. Maybe it’s just human nature to be dismissive of others’ success. And horror filmmakers, like horror fans, instinctively push back whenever a film becomes too big. As Tony Timpone notes, “Horror fans want horror films to be just theirs. So when these films have mainstream appeal . . . and when Joe Schmo and middle America and the rest of the world embraces these films, horror fans get jealous.”

  Sometimes, however, the attacks on our own are justified. For years, I had heard rumbles that the well-known writer and horror personality Lianne Spiderbaby had been passing off other writers’ work as her own. I knew nothing of Spiderbaby (obviously not her real name, but an homage to Jack Hill’s cult classic), other than that she absolutely detested my I Spit on Your Grave remake, but I figured most of these ad hominem attacks had more to do with the fact she was not only gorgeous but currently dating Quentin Tarantino. After all, most horror geeks never got to fuck the head cheerleader (or any cheerleader, or any girl for that matter) and relished the opportunity to take a beautiful colleague down a peg. This woman was a contributor to Fangoria, FEARnet, and Video Watchdog, in addition to other well-respected publications, so obviously, I thought, she knew how to write. Plus, if these allegations were really true, they would be fairly easy to prove.