The Horror of It All

by Adam Rockoff

  The zombies continued to multiply, invading every nook and cranny of contemporary life. Living-dead video games were everywhere, from old-school nineties franchises that kept churning out new versions (House of the Dead, Doom, Resident Evil) to completely new apocalypses like Dead Rising, Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, and Splatterhouse (although an early iteration of that one hit arcades in 1988). And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of social media zombie games designed for the iPad and smartphone platforms. Under the eye of Frank Darabont (at least initially), Robert Kirkman’s comic The Walking Dead was adapted into the highest-rated basic cable drama of all time. Funnyman Mel Brooks’s son Max Brooks published The Zombie Survival Guide. After this became a bestseller, he followed up with World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. In 2013, the filmed adaptation, the most expensive zombie movie ever made, was finally released after well-publicized production problems. Those who hated the fast-moving zombies of 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake absolutely despised those in World War Z, which attacked less like reanimated humans than swarms of pestilence. Most surreal of all—and the bar is set pretty high in a world of zombie lollipops and toilet seat covers—in 2011, the Centers for Disease Control released a graphic novel to instruct the populace about how to deal with a zombie plague. According to US assistant surgeon general Dr. Ali Khan, “if you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack.” I don’t know what’s most disturbing, the thought of an actual zombie invasion or the fact that people need disaster preparation fed to them under the guise of entertainment.

  I know this is going to sound like one of those made-up anecdotes, or at least tweaked to make it chronologically convenient, but I swear to god it’s completely true. I just took a break from writing to tuck my daughter into bed. She was reading a book and before she inserted the bookmark to save her spot, I caught a glimpse of it. It was an age-appropriate cartoon of a grinning, rotting corpse, accompanied by the text “READ TO A ZOMBIE . . . IF YOU DARE.”

  When my eight-year-old daughter who’s far more interested in American Girl dolls than anything horror related can casually incorporate a living-dead tchotchke into her bedtime ritual, clearly something is in the air. But what is it?

  An essay in the April 6–7, 2013, weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal attempted to answer this very question. It was titled “The Lessons of Zombie-Mania” and was written by Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. At first, it kind of pissed me off, which is usually how I feel whenever horror issues seep into the mainstream and somebody with no apparent expertise in the genre attempts to contextualize these trends. If anybody was going to write about the current zombie craze, it sure as hell shouldn’t have been some stuffy academic. After I put aside my self-righteous indignation and read the article, I had to admit, the guy actually knew what he was talking about.

  While I might call bullshit on Drezner’s theory that “zombies thrive in popular culture during times of recession, epidemic and general unhappiness,” you’d have to be a fool not to acknowledge that at the very least, they’re a metaphor for something. But what is this something? Is it the ever-present threat of terrorism in post-9/11 America? Global pandemics? Climate change, whose resulting Frankenstorms are as unpredictable and relentless as zombie hordes?

  If you think about it, zombies are the most political monsters because they’re actually the least political. They’re a blank slate onto which anybody can project their pet anxieties. To those on the right of the political spectrum, zombies are terrorists, monstrous creatures devoid of human emotion that must be immediately destroyed. To the left, they represent the great unwashed masses, shuffling along mindlessly as their civil liberties—and individuality—are stripped away. The first act of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead plays upon this conceit quite cleverly; the characters remain oblivious to the zombie menace around them because, at least on the surface, those infected don’t act particularly different.

  Which is the correct interpretation? Like all art, that depends on both the intent of the creator and the way in which audiences choose to process the information.

  But one thing is certain: there are far less interesting ways to look at popular culture than through the prism of flesh-eating ghouls with no conscience and a taste for brains.

  This answer—or more accurately, this nonanswer—might be a bit nebulous for some. For pundits like Drezner, it’s taken as gospel that violent entertainment—specifically horror films—really does thrive in times of societal strife.

  As any first-year science student will tell you, correlation does not imply causation. However, I think we can all agree on two things: 1) in the past ten years or so, we’ve seen a resurgence of uncompromising horror films, ones that are less a harmless roller-coaster ride than a vessel to explore the darkest recesses of the human condition, and 2) the last decade has been especially stressful: The war in Iraq. A floundering economy. A nation divided fairly evenly between red and blue values—sometimes it seems like the very fabric of America is coming apart.

  I’ve already detailed the reason I dislike the term “torture porn” being used to identify a specific subgenre of horror films, but, I’ll admit, the term still gives us a pretty accurate idea of the types of films we’re talking about. Although blame for this movement is usually laid right at the feet of Roth and Hostel, Saw was actually released a year before in 2004. And a year before that, both Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses and Wrong Turn began the inexorable march toward a harder, more in-your-face brand of horror film. Seventies über-nasty exploitationer I Spit on Your Grave was remade (with a brilliant script reminiscent of Citizen Kane!). Although it lacked the shocking realism of its predecessor, the revenge murders were far more graphic. Its unfairly dismissed 2013 sequel upped the rape and torture even further. The Human Centipede, its sequel, and its upcoming third “sequence” explore the nauseating possibilities of the titular creature, created by surgically connecting a train of human beings ass-to-mouth. Even if this sounds like your thing, trust me, there’s nothing even remotely sexual about the scenario. For sheer nihilism, however, nothing can touch A Serbian Film. It’s the story of an aging male porn star who’s blackmailed into one last performance. And, um, things don’t go well, which led to bans of the film in a handful of countries. Philosophy of a Knife would come close if the torture wasn’t so over-the-top that it actually diminishes the impact. Shot documentary-style, the film re-creates the human experiments of imperial Japan’s notorious Unit 731. Teeth are extracted, flesh is burned, and an enormous live insect is inserted into a victim’s vagina. One of them—either the animal or the vagina—has to be fake (I guess/hope), although I’ll be damned if I can tell which it is. Then there is the seemingly never-ending supply of direct-to-video offerings whose one-word titles should tell you everything you need to know about the film: Broken, Scar, Vile, Chop, Hunger.

  These films offered an even bleaker vision than their seventies counterparts. In the original I Spit on Your Grave, Jennifer is brutalized beyond comprehension, and ostensibly changed forever. But by the end of the film, her four attackers are taking dirt naps while she’s cruising the lake in a motorboat—deranged but alive. Even Wes Craven’s two early revenge flicks end on somewhat of an upbeat note. In Last House on the Left, Mari’s parents off Krug and co., while in The Hills Have Eyes the civilized city folks make the rural mutants pay.

  But today, it’s all so fucking grim. Most of the victims in Saw die horribly, while Jigsaw returns to kill again (and again, and again, and again . . . ). Although the main character in Hostel survives, he’s knocked off in the first scene of the sequel. The ending of A Serbian Film is so soul crushing I can’t even bring myself to write about it.

  So the question isn’t if the horror film has become more downbeat, but why. Is it simply a logical progression, a way to up the ante for a generation becoming rapidly d
esensitized to traditional violence? Or is it a reaction to the zeitgeist, a safe way to process the new realities of terrorism, disease, and natural disasters?

  One answer came from an unlikely place: television. Since 2002, Mick Garris had been organizing a series of informal dinners where his friends and fellow horror filmmakers would meet to catch up and swap war stories. This led to a partnership with Showtime for Masters of Horror, a series that ran for two seasons between 2005 and 2007. Thirteen “masters” were each given $1–2 million and carte blanche to do what they wanted. No studio interference, no meddling producers, no rules. In return, Showtime got more than it bargained for.

  Joe Dante’s episode “Homecoming” was a scathing attack on the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, at the time one of the few mainstream films to take such an unapologetic point of view. Less graphic than ideologically combustible, “Homecoming” aired intact. But other episodes weren’t so lucky. Dario Argento’s “Jenifer” was trimmed of a “penis chewing” scene. Takashi Miike’s contribution was shelved altogether.I His graphic scenes of torture—including cringe-inducing shots of needles being inserted under fingernails and into the gum line—were deemed far too offensive even for a series designed to shock and disgust. Dante may have said it best, not just about Masters of Horror but about the past ten years in general: “In the world we live in, we like to push the envelope, so today’s gory horror movies are gorier than the last generation’s horror movies. There is a limit to what you can do to horror, and frankly I thought we had reached it in the mid-’80s. But apparently not.”

  I’ve been talking about the changes taking place within the horror film as if they were exclusively an American phenomenon, hardly surprising since I’m an American author writing in America. However, concurrent to the boom in the States, horror was exploding in all corners of the globe.

  The most obvious place was Japan, which had a long history of supernatural films. The modern crop inspired the moniker “J-horror,” as unimaginative a descriptor as there ever was. We coined “Spaghetti Horror” for Italy and “Kiwi Horror” for down under, and “J-horror” is the best we can come up with for Japan?

  For whatever reason, we seem to view foreign horror as single homogenized entities specific to each country. An illustrative analogy would be our conception of aliens. Regardless of the medium (film, literature, video games), and their home planet, the alien visitors all look exactly the same. Of course, their appearance differs from work to work—the creatures in Alien are worlds away from those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—but rarely, if ever, within the works themselves. It’s as if a race of beings who have mastered the technology to travel light-years to visit us has already ferreted out all the artificial constructs that keep us apart—gender, ethnicity, religion, class, creed. By contrast, what would an alien find if he landed on Earth? It depends, of course, on where he landed. How could he reconcile a bunch of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn with the indigenous tribes of the Amazon? What does a Bedouin of the Sahara have in common with a Hong Kong businessman?

  How is any of this relevant? Well, if we apply this concept to J-horror, the face of the genre was unquestionably a pale-as-death ghost girl with long black hair, especially after the release of 1998’s Ringu and its American remake, The Ring. To be sure, this specter, which has deep roots in Japanese culture, was pervasive, but it certainly wasn’t representative of all J-horror. Professional provocateur Takashi Miike was well on his way to sucker punching unsuspecting audiences long before Sadako climbed out of her watery grave. In fact, in a way, Japan mirrored the American horror scene in that the only thing consistent was its inconsistency. On one end of the spectrum, you had the brethren of Ringu, subtle yet terrifying ghost stories such as Ju-on and Kairo. On the other were some of the wildest and most ridiculously over-the-top movies ever made; films such as Tokyo Gore Police and The Machine Girl make Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste feel like a Robert Bresson film. At the dawn of the new millennium, Japan was plagued by a precipitous spike in youth crime. You had kids killing each other, their respected elders, and even themselves in a spasm of violence that until now was thought to be an exclusively Western problem. As the island nation struggled to make sense of these crimes, films such as Battle Royale and Suicide Club reflected the hopelessness of the times.

  If Japan had a challenger for most notable horror resurgence it would have to be France. Let me tell you something right off the bat—I can’t stand the French. There’s no point in going through all the reasons; they’re the same reasons other fair-minded people have for hating them. I’ve only visited the country once. It was for business in Cannes. I pictured the French Riviera as a ribbon of white-sand beaches where Bardot clones sunbathed topless while washing their hair with Perrier. When I got there, it stunk of fish and looked like Massachusetts.

  Not a single Frenchman I met in Cannes managed to change the opinion I already had of them. When I was in tenth grade, we had two foreign exchange students stay with us. I thought it was a terrible idea from the beginning, but since it was through my sister’s private school and my parents were fully supportive, there wasn’t much I could do. Everyone knows that the French don’t wear deodorant, so naturally I warned my family that the boy, named Jean Michel, was going to smell like shit. My parents dismissed my concerns and called me narrow-minded. “These are Parisians from the city,” my mother said, admonishing me. “They’re sophisticated people. They’re going to smell better than you.” Flash-forward to the first, and I mean the very first, day. By nighttime, my mother had to open all the windows in our house in the dead of winter to air out the stench. Better than me indeed. To make matters worse, the kid ended up falling in love with our neighbor’s au pair. We spent one frantic night scouring the neighborhood, wondering where a lovesick Frenchman would be most inclined to hide out. Luckily, the girl exchange student proved less unpredictable. Instead, she spent the majority of her stay alternating between bouts of crying and vomiting. So don’t tell me I have no firsthand experience with the French.

  That said, I can put aside my animus toward those snail-eating bastards and appreciate their first real attempt at horror since the films of Jean Rollin and their most important cinematic movement since the French New Wave. Historically, horror was never much of a Gallic mainstay, although Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face are certainly among the best the genre has to offer. This all changed in 2002 with Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, which has the dubious distinction of containing the longest, and most disturbing, rape scene in mainstream cinema. Things kicked off in earnest a year later with Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension, a gialloesque mind-fuck with a final twist that divided both viewers and critics alike. Ils (Them) is an overrated home invasion film that is actually inferior to its American clone, The Strangers. Frontière(s) was the country’s attempt at backwoods horror. Many called it a sly political allegory; I found it silly. Martyrs received the most press for its relentless misanthropy and final scene in which a character is skinned alive (as unsettling as it is, it’s not much more graphic than similar scenes in the X-Files episode “Hellbound” or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Villains”). The best of this entire bunch, and, in my opinion, one of the twenty greatest horror films ever made,II was À l’Intérieur (Inside), a relatively straightforward story about a pregnant woman, alone in her house at night, who will do anything to protect her unborn child. The first time I saw it, I was completely blown away. Written and directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, it’s absolutely criminal that the film was released straight to DVD on the Dimension Extreme label. At least it’s better than not being released at all, I guess.

  From Argentina to Australia, Spain to Serbia, Ireland to Israel, homegrown horror industries were percolating everywhere. The Internet offered an unparalleled opportunity for audiences to sample the local cuisine in far-flung places. Horror had truly become a global phenomenon. And conveniently, it had never been more accessible.<
br />
  Arguably, the most important development of the past decade (actually, the past fifteen years) was not even a thematic or contextual trend but a stylistic one. It was initiated at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival when a little movie from Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, two friends who had met at the University of Central Florida School of Film, became the sleeper hit of the festival. Inspired by the 1970s television series In Search of . . . , as well as the documentary style of drive-in favorite The Legend of Boggy Creek, the conceit of The Blair Witch Project, while not completely original, certainly felt fresh. The text on the poster said it all: “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary . . . A year later their footage was found.” Their entire story is told through the “found footage” discovered by police the following year. To mimic the look of footage shot by a real amateur crew, The Blair Witch Project uses a shaky-cam aesthetic. The technique added a layer of gritty realism not seen since the last of the grindhouses closed its doors. There were reports of people vomiting in the theater, unaccustomed to the effect. Stephen King admitted it might have been the only film he has ever been too scared to finish watching.III Lots of people who viewed Blair Witch sight unseen, and had not been privy to the marketing blitz, thought it was a genuine documentary.

  Although the exact numbers are hard to come by, most accounts peg the film’s entire budget at around $35,000. So when Artisan Entertainment acquired The Blair Witch Project for $1.1 million and promised to put a substantial marketing push behind it, it was obvious the plan was to treat the film as something more than a typical microbudget festival pickup. With a combination of promotional savvy and dumb luck (far more of the former than the latter), the film exploded. It also had the good fortune to be released at a time when the Internet was transitioning from the domain of the technologically savvy to an indispensable communication tool for even the most unconnected Luddite. A woman I worked with at the time was so obsessed with the film and its mythology that she spent hours each day exploring Blair Witch’s then-cutting-edge website. A Sci-Fi Channel special, The Curse of the Blair Witch, stoked interest in the film before it even opened. It was featured on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and dozens of entertainment periodicals—solidifying its place as a true old media/new media crossover.