Postmodernism and Slasher

7/21/2019 Postmodernism and Slasher

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Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture

Harmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 78-8878

The term “postmodernism” is bandied

around rather freely in contemporary culture,especially with respect to recent Hollywoodmovies. And often, postmodern comes to bea descriptor filled with derision, especiallyamong critics seeking to dismiss popular cul-ture, with postmodern “blank parody” andlack of affect viewed as tapping a tired lack of originality and inauthentic pleasures. Fredric Jameson’s seminal essay, “Postmodernism, orThe Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” is themost frequently ransacked to describe “theemergence of a new kind of flatness ordepthlessness, a new kind of superficiality inthe most literal sense”1 and to confirm that“the producers of culture have nowhere toturn but to the past: the imitation of deadstyles, speech through all the masks andvoices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.”2

Recent horror movies have trendedstrongly towards Jamesonian postmodern

characteristics, and also have been subject tothe negative judgments that can be associated

with postmodernism—not least because the

films are often slick high-concept packagesaimed at the MTV generation, featuring castsof trendy teen actors from popular televisionshows. But in spite of the (usually “high”-minded) criticism surrounding turns towardpostmodernism, these postmodern horrorfilms have been remarkably popular andfinancially successful. Employing extremes of self-reflexivity with copious intertextualreferences to earlier horror landmarks,postmodern horror texts revitalized the ailinggenre in the mid-1990s and continue to boastcommercial success. The most influential of these is Scream (1996), which grossed over$100 million domestically and spawned nu-merous imitations, including two sequels of its own. Its postmodern conceit is simple:Scream is a slasher movie in which the charac-ters are well versed in the rules andconventions of slasher movies, to the self-ref-erential point of characters talking at length

about earlier slasher pics, such as Halloween(1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and Nightmare on

ANDREW SYDER

Knowing the Rules

Postmodernism and the Horror Film

Detail from poster advertising Last House on the Left (1972)(photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences)



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Elm Street (1984)—the latter of which, likeScream , was directed by Wes Craven.

The wake of Scream provoked the post-modern horror boom, with many filmscoming from Scream-related talent; indeed,

Scream’s director Wes Craven and writerKevin Williamson themselves are somethingof a cottage industry in postmodern horror.Before Scream , Freddy Krueger received apostmodern makeover with Wes Craven’s NewNightmare (1994), in which Freddy enters“our” world to threaten the real-life makers of the Elm Street series—including HeatherLangenkamp (the actress who played theheroine in the original A Nightmare on Elm

Street) and Craven himself. Hot from Scream ,Williamson has been prominently attached toa number of other postmodern horror movies,including the retro-slasher I Know What YouDid Last Summer (1997), the high-school body-snatchers flick The Faculty (1998) andthe successful Halloween H20 (1998) revival of the Halloween series.

Elsewhere, the pop-cultural universe of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’sFrom Dusk Till Dawn (1996) features self-

conscious casting of cult horror celebrities likeTom Savini and John Saxon. The Bates Motelwas renovated in 1998 by Gus Van Sant, whodared a shot-for-shot color remake of AlfredHitchcock’s Psycho (1960), taking Jamesonianimitation of the past to the nth degree. TheBlair Witch Project (1999) was staggeringlysuccessful, and shared its self-reflexive narra-tive frame (filmmakers lost in the woodssearching for supernatural beings) with the

earlier The Last Broadcast (1998). Also illus-trating postmodern self-reflexivity, thesubsequent Scream installments, Tesis (1996),Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) and HalloweenResurrection (2002) set their plots in differentsites of media production (film school andfestivals, television and web broadcasts).There have also been “straighter” horror filmsthat each channel distinct versions of thehorror format with a glib knowingness,displaying to varying degrees the postmodern

self-awareness and irony which seems to beintegral to the continued success of these

kinds of films, such as Urban Legends (1998) ,Bats (1999), The In Crowd (2000) , Dracula2000 (2000) , Jason X (2001), Ghosts of Mars(2001) and two high-tech William Castleremakes House on Haunted Hill (1999) and

Thir13een Ghosts (2001). Most of these post-modern horror movies have even become thesubject of parodic imitation themselves inthe Scary Movie series (2000-2003).

Still, some old school horror fans and cul-tural tastemakers position “postmodernism”as negative, reflected in that each Scream in-stallment after the original has been indicted by some critics for its apparent superficialityand derivativeness, suggesting a decline in

the genre since it went postmodern. CultureKiosque titled its Scream 3 review, “The deathof the postmodern slasher pic,”3 while anothercritic states: “Scream 3 and its spinoffs willmake Scream and Scream 2 seem like greatmasterpieces of postmodern horror. As thetongue in cheek genre again begins to ruin thehorror film as an effective meditation on is-sues which affect society…things will becomeintolerable.”4 Such pejorative views, however,risk obscuring important questions about how

and why the horror genre has embracedpostmodernism with such fervor.

Rather than seeing this recent wave of hor-ror movies as the “death” of the genre—oreven their postmodern hallmarks as repre-senting an entirely new development—I willargue that a certain kinship has existed be-tween postmodernism and horror for quitesome time. The interlacing of postmodernismand horror in these recent films affords the

opportunity to more clearly examine intercon-nections between the two, which will not onlyfacilitate a greater understanding of contem-porary horror cinema, but also provide a newmodel through which to view the horrorgenre as a whole. Both postmodern theoryand the horror genre are fundamentally con-cerned with parallel questions about how weperceive and make sense of the world aroundus, and as such both offer comparable modelsfor ordering the knowledge we possess about

the external world.



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Perception and Knowledge inPostmodern Theory

The intersection of postmodern theory withthe horror genre occurs most prominentlyaround phenomenological issues. Phenom-enologically-oriented postmodern theory,especially the theory that derives fromFriedrich Nietzsche, is concerned with thechallenging of century-old epistemological as-sumptions about how we perceive and makesense of phenomena in the world. Tracingphenomenological postmodern thought back to Nietzsche is productive, due to the potentcorrelations between his writings and the hor-ror genre. An examination of horror’s

organization of its visual field, particularlyduring suspense sequences, allows the teasingout of phenomenological and epistemologicalpresuppositions which underlie those organi-zational choices, presuppositions akin tomany of Nietzsche’s concerns. Returning toNietzsche is also a strategic gesture in thatpostmodernism is often thought to be a recentphenomenon, and his work reminds us thatthe crises associated with postmodernity have been around since the nineteenth century— just as many of the concerns of postmodernhorror movies can be traced back throughoutthe history of the genre.

Many scholars have located Nietzsche’swork as the foundation for much of thetwentieth-century emergence of postmodernthought. Jürgen Habermas has referredto Nietzsche as the turning point in the entryinto postmodernity,5 while Cornel Westhas mapped out Nietzsche’s influence on

postmodern American philosophers such asW. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn and RichardRorty.6 West points to three particular areas of influence: the move toward antirealism orconventionalism in ontology (the rejection of atheory-free external world), the move towardantifoundationalism in epistemology (therejection of any solid foundations for knowl-edge claims), and the move toward thetranscendentalization of the subject or the dis-missal of the mind as a sphere of inquiry (therejection of a Cartesian mind-body split).West also outlines Nietzsche’s influence in the

wider field of postmodern thought, throughthe differently inflected paradigms of suchdiverse theorists as Jacques Derrida, Paulde Man, Michel Foucault, Edward Said,Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer and

Jean-Paul Sartre.7The centrality of Nietzsche to the founda-

tions of postmodernism lies in his explicitcritique of Plato—what Gilles Deleuze charac-terizes as the questioning of what it meansto “reverse Platonism.”8 Nietzsche argued thatalthough we believe we know somethingabout the things of the world when we speak of them, all we really possess are metaphors forthose things, metaphors which in no way cor-

respond to an original entity or essence, whichhas particular impact on conceptions of truth:

…to be truthful means to employ the usualmetaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this isthe duty to lie according to fixed convention, tolie with the herd and in a manner binding byeveryone. Now man of course forgets that this isthe way things stand for him. Thus he lies in themanner indicated, unconsciously and in accor-dance with habits which are centuries old, andprecisely by means of this unconsciousness and

forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.9

Instead of Plato’s position that a truth existsexternal to senses and cognition, Nietzscheargued that all our knowledge of the world isa “thoroughly anthropomorphic truth whichcontains not a single point of view whichwould be ‘true in itself’ or really and univer-sally apart from man.”10 In other words, ourknowledge of the world represents a meta-morphosis of the world into man, with the

“laws of nature” existing only within our per-ceptions of them: “all these relations alwaysrefer again to others and are thoroughly in-comprehensible to us in their essence. All thatwe actually know about these laws of natureis what we ourselves bring to them.”11

Nietzsche further argues that the laws of na-ture as we conceptualize them are foundedupon human senses of perception that arefundamentally unreliable and deceptive: oureyes only gliding over the surfaces of things,

“they are content to receive stimuli and, as itwere, to engage in a groping game on the



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backs of things.”12 Thus, whereas Platonicthought conceived of external laws of naturewhich can be rationally perceived if one iscareful enough, for Nietzsche there are no ex-trinsic laws of nature, and the laws that we

ascribe to nature are not only anthropomor-phized, they are founded on deceptivesensory misperceptions.

Querying what it means to “reversePlatonism,” Nietzsche sustains a tension between our perception of and knowledgeabout the world, such that we can no longertrust in the knowledge we acquire of theworld through our senses. This tension can beseen throughout postmodern thought, par-

ticularly in the rejection of a theory-freeexternal world and the rejection of any solidfoundations for knowledge claims. For ex-ample, Jean Baudrillard’s and others’ ideas of simulation/simulacrum13 extends Nietzsche’sepistemological and phenomenological con-cerns: the simulacrum derives from a notionof the world as comprised of surface appear-ances which lack any inner essence andpossess no transcendental meaning outside of those meanings that we place on top of them.

In other words, Nietzsche and the post-modern thinkers who followed posit afundamental phenomenological uncertaintyabout the apparent, familiar world around usand our perception of it.

Perception and Knowledge in theHorror Genre

Both the thematics and textual organization of horror suggest that the genre is fundamentally

engaged with many of the same issues as thephenomenological strain of postmoderntheory. The relationship between our percep-tion of and knowledge about the worldinforms many of the basic tropes of the genre.For example, horror is often described as agenre that taps into our fear of the unknown;that is, the horror of the genre frequently de-rives from the safety of the familiar, knownworld being violated by something unknown,something that lies outside of the laws we

have ascribed to nature. This is particularlytrue in the horror tales dealing with monsters

or the supernatural, such that Robin Wood hasargued most horror movies follow adeceptively simple formula: “normality isthreatened by the Monster,” wherein normal-ity means conformity with dominant social

norms.14 Wood’s concerns are primarily ideo-logical and psychoanalytical, but hisparadigm could be rearticulated in phenom-enological and epistemological terms as, “theknown world is threatened by the unknown.”

Throwing our ability to know the familiar,material world into crisis, horror seems basedon an understanding that behind the appar-ent, known world may lie something whichevades our ability to metamorphose the world

into man, an unknowable sphere that repre-sents a potential fissure in our faith in theapparent, known world. Gothic horrorprovides an especially potent variation on thisin its opposition of the diurnal and nocturnalas dual worlds. Charlene Bunnell has notedof the Gothic novel that the conventionalassumptions, embedded in Christian mythol-ogies, that the daylight world correspondsto “good” and the night world to “evil,” arenot so simple:

One world is the external one—cultural andinstitutional; it is “light” because it is familiarand common. The other world is the internalone—primitive and intuitive; it is dark, not because it necessarily signifies evil (although itmay), but because it is unfamiliar and un-known.15

Noting the unknown in the Gothic novel iscoded as dark and the known as light, Bunnellpoints to a particular significant relationship

between knowledge and visibility: the dark and light of the dual worlds directly correlate between the familiarity of the world and ourrelative ability to see it. Echoing phenom-enologically-oriented postmodern theory,our (in)ability to know the world aroundus in horror is intrinsically linked to the(un)reliability of our senses of perception.

This epistemological tension betweenknowledge and perception is also alluded toin Tzvetan Todorov’s description of the “un-canny” and the “marvelous,” two possibleresponses elicited by “fantastic” literature



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which positions characters (and the reader) toacknowledge events unexplainable by famil-iar laws of the natural world, such as theappearance of vampires or devils:

…either he is the victim of an illusion of thesenses, of a product of the imagination—andlaws of the world then remain what they are; orelse the event has indeed taken place, it is anintegral part of reality—but then this reality iscontrolled by laws unknown to us.16

In the case of the uncanny, our knowledgeof the world is challenged but remainsintact, because we had merely misperceivedthe event. In the case of the marvelous, ourperceptions have in fact been accurate, but our

initial knowledge of the world is provento have been incorrect or incomplete.

Adapting Todorov’s remarks to horrorcinema allows us to note that terror andsuspense are often generated by keeping therelationship between perception and knowl-edge in a state of flux, such that we are unsureabout the reliability of our senses and/or un-sure about the stability of the laws that wehave ascribed to nature. Perception’s role is infact even more significant in horror films, be-cause of cinema’s ability to represent theworld by way of actual sensory perceptions,stimulating our visual and aural senses in amuch more direct and experiential mannerthan the written prose of literature. Whereasliterature alludes to perception, in film we areable to experience it first-hand, with thecamera able to both enable or curtail vision.As such, horror movies’ structuring of the visual field implies certain phenom-

enological presuppositions about how weperceive and understand the world aroundus. This is particularly clear in Gothic horrorfilms: the translation of Gothic’s dual worldsto celluloid takes the form of actual night/dayfilming, or they are alluded to throughstylistic devices in the mise-en-scène that eitherallow or obscure vision. The darknessof the nocturnal world may also be ren-dered through the use of shadows,chiaroscuro lighting, diffusion, mist and

fog, or off-screen space, blocking vision,keeping objects hidden and unknown.

The Val Lewton-produced Gothic chillers of the 1940s are exemplars of this tendency,

wherein the “monster” is almost never re-vealed to the camera. An archetypal exampleis Cat People (1942), the story of Irena, a youngSerbian woman in America who may (or maynot) be afflicted with an ancient curse thatturns her into a killer panther upon sexualarousal. The film’s acclaimed suspense se-quences illustrate the particular relationships between structures of seeing and the un/known in horror. When jealous Irena follows

her rival Alice (who is competing for the affec-tions of Irena’s husband) down a street atnight, Irena mysteriously vanishes. Her foot-steps suddenly stop, and she is not seen forthe rest of the sequence. The lighting designhere is carefully organized such that the spotsof light on the sidewalk under each streetlampare separated by stretches of deep darkness.Sensing that something might be followingher, Alice begins to walk briskly and ner-vously through the dark stretches, pausing to

look back every time she reaches a bright areaunder a lamp. When a bus—stable signifier of

The knowledge of film-as-film is figured as reassuring in 1972’ s

Last House on the Left (Wes Craven)(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)



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the known world—pulls up beside her, thesuspense of the sequence is dissipated, andshe enters back into the familiar, social world.

In another, similar sequence, in an attemptto escape from what sounds like a panther,

Alice jumps into a swimming pool for safety.Again, there is a strong visual and thematicdialectic between light and dark, known andunknown, articulated here through editing between two distinct patterns of mise-en-scène.The scene cuts back and forth between Alicewaiting at the illuminated center of the pooland shots from her point-of-view looking to-wards the dark shadows at the sides of thepool, which may or may not conceal a killer

cat. Once again, the fear of the unknown isalleviated when the main lights of the indoorpool are switched on, returning Alice tothe visible, known world.

These sequences explicitly indicate theinability of both the character and the camerato see the unknown threat as a source of suspense. Light is specifically aligned withsafety and the darkness with threat or danger.That which is visible to us corresponds to theknown world, which is in turn coded as safe;

that which is beyond visibility is coded as both unknown and threatening. A cleardemarcation between known and unknownworlds, represented through a coherent spati-ality in which the areas of darkness are visiblydistinct from the areas of light, places a de-gree of faith in visual perception. When weare able to perceive the world, we can be sureof its laws; but when our vision is blocked,we cannot be certain of the laws governing

the unknown. In other words, the Gothichorror film acknowledges that there arepotentia lly unknown things in the world,things to threaten the laws of the world as weknow them, but positions those things as dis-crete and separate from a known world inwhich we can trust.

Other types of horror films are also orga-nized around the same dialectic of perceptionand knowledge, although often with differentinflections. Slasher/splatter movies Last

House on the Left (1972) and The Texas ChainSaw Massacre (1974) offer reversals of the

Gothic tendencies of Cat People. The majorityof the murders in both films take place not atnight, but in the bright sunlight of the diurnalworld, and they are committed by humanrather than supernatural monsters. Instead of finding safety in the light, both films make thevisible, known world the primary source of terror—primarily through grotesquely realis-tic gore effects. The opening of Texas ChainSaw is exemplary: a totally black screen is

punctured by flash images (lit by a cameraflashbulb) of corpses that have been illegallyexhumed. The source of shock in the se-quence stems less from the stretches of blackness than from what we can see: the brief images of rotting corpses and the horrific actof desecration. In other words, the knowledgeof the world we acquire from perception isposited as threatening, suggesting a fear of theknown as much as a fear of the unknown.

Horror films centered around ESP or mad

scientists offer yet more variations of theknowledge/perception dialectic. Focusing on

Dizzying mise-en-abî me: Wes Craven as himself in Wes

Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), writing and directing the film

as we watch(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)



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characters with powers of extra-sensory per-ception implies limitations to our normalsense of perception, and our faith in the lawsof nature is reduced correspondingly, as thefact of ESP/telekinesis would go against ratio-

nal scientific thought. Films with madscientists offer similar disruptions by bendingthe “objective” scientific laws of nature to al-low for such fantastic creations as theFrankenstein monster, Dr. Moreau’s island,or Ray Milland’s X-Ray vision serum in The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963).

In placing the relationship between our per-ception and knowledge of the world in aconstant state of tension and flux, the horror

genre mirrors many of the primary thrusts of postmodern theory, even in those horror films(like Cat People and Texas Chain Saw) not nor-mally categorized as “postmodern.” In itsvarious configurations of the relationship between perception and the laws of nature—such as those outlined by Todorov—thehorror genre can be mapped along variouspoints of the spectrum between Plato andNietzsche. For Plato there was a theory-freeexternal world, and there were solid founda-

tions for knowledge claims about that world;for Nietzsche, neither was the case. In at-tempting to reverse Platonism, Nietzsche andhis descendants grapple with how to over-come centuries of conditioning which haveled us to instinctually believe that our sensescan be reliable and that we can determine thelaws of nature by observing the world. Bydestabilizing the trust we place in our percep-tions or by questioning the laws of nature,

horror movies move away from the securityand rationality of a Platonic worldview,towards the potentially nihilistic irrationalityfavored by Nietzsche, wherein we no longerhave solid foundations for understanding theworld around us. In horror this erosion of thestable framework of perception is manifestedas both terrifying and threatening.

The Postmodern Horror Film

When viewed through the rhythms and ten-

sions between the known/unknown and theNietzschean destabilization of perception that

accompanies them, we will be able to see howthe formal and thematic strategies of the re-cent wave of postmodern horror moviesamount to more than simply just an “imitationof dead styles” and a new form of superficial-

ity and depthlessness. Rather than marking a break from past manifestations of the genre,the coupling of postmodernism and horror infilms such as Scream in fact makes explicit thecorrelation between the two that had beenpresent all along. Such traits as self-reflexiv-ity and intertextuality merely reframe theterms of the known/unknown dialectic andfurther reconfigure the relationship betweenperception of and knowledge about theworld. Specifically, by representing theknown/unknown dialectic in a particularlyself-conscious way, postmodern horror filmsdraw attention to their own textual construc-tion and the rules and conventions throughwhich they operate. The effect of suchdeconstructive strategies, as we shall see, isthe suggestion that the terror and suspensegenerated by contemporary horror moviesstem as much from the concerns about filmmedium itself as from a fear of the unknown.

The self-reflexivity of postmodern horrormovies seems especially purposeful becausethe horror genre, since its inception, has al-ways relied heavily on language and rhetoricas a means of representing the unknownforces that frighten us. Todorov argues thatthis consistent use of rhetorical figures is a re-sult of the fantastic emerging from rhetoric:

The supernatural is born of language, it is bothits consequence and its proof: not only do the

devil and vampires exist only in words, butlanguage alone enables us to conceive what isalways absent: the supernatural.17

Rhetorical figures such as vampires,werewolves and zombies all are foundedupon sets of “rules” that govern their exist-ence—vampires traditionally drink blood,turn into bats, fear garlic and crosses, and can be killed by sunlight or a stake through theheart. The mythical figure takes form withinthe boundaries of these rules; without vam-pire lore and its rules, there would be novampire. In many horror films, the expert



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who is able to destroy the monster (such asDracula’s nemesis, Van Helsing) is powerfulnot because of any physical or supernaturalstrength, but rather because s/he possesses anunderstanding of the rules that define the

monster’s existence. Shadows and darknessin Gothic horror operate as a similar rhetoricaldevices. The nocturnal realm serves to signifythe unknown; the restriction of vision is a rhe-torical gesture in its own right.18

Postmodern horror movies’ deployment of self-reflexivity and intertextuality explicitlyexposes and demystifies this rhetorical natureof representations of the unknown, encourag-ing the audience to see the monster/unknown

as a fictional construct that can only exist inlanguage. When, for example, the protago-nists in From Dusk Till Dawn realize they are battling vampires, rather than turning to aVan Helsing-style expert for advice, they in-stead discuss how Hammer Horror actorPeter Cushing would slay vampires when he played Van Helsing, reminding us thatTarantino’s vampires are of the same order asthose vampires the protagonists refer to fromthe old horror movies—an effect of rhetoric.19

The Scream trilogy offers similar strategies of rhetorical deconstruction, such as the charac-ters’ self-reflexive discussions of the rules oneneeds to follow in order to survive a slashermovie, or the killers’ highly self-consciouscostumes—the grim reaper black cape andHalloween ghostface mask recalling bothEdvard Munch’s The Scream as well as maskedslasher-movie killers like Michael Myers (Hal-loween) and Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th). In

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare , Wes Craven(playing himself) even explains explicitly thatFreddy Krueger is a rhetorical symbol of ourage-old primal fears about unknown evils,and his form as the supernatural killer withfinger-knives is merely “the current version.”

The effect of postmodern horror’s self-reflexivity and intertextuality also alters howwe understand the known world; the familiarworld itself revealed to be a rhetorical con-struct, not just the horror of the unknown.

Exposing both known and unknown worlds asconstructs, the relationship between the two

becomes more schizophrenic and fragmentarythan in other horror film models, with no cleardemarcation between the two. For example,The Blair Witch Project’s pretensions towarddocumentary reality (both in the film and its

promotional materials) presents itself as en-tirely mediated experience, where every scenein the film is shot from the perspective of theprotagonists’ camera lens, insisting on reflexiveawareness of filming. Both the mysterious, un-known sphere occupied by the Blair Witch andthe familiar, known world of the Maryland backwoods are presented equally as rhetoricalconstructs. We are offered no possibility of “di-rect” access to the familiar, known world,

suggesting, in accordance with Nietzsche, thatwe can never actually gain unmediated accessto the known world.20

This deconstructing of the known isrendered in particularly extreme waysthrough the dizzying use of mise-en-abîme inWes Craven’s New Nightmare. Throughout thefilm, we are left uncertain whether the sceneswe are watching are intended to signify theknown, familiar world (one in which therehave already been six previous Freddy

Krueger films) or a dream world that doesnot subscribe to the laws of nature as weknow them. The film opens with images of anew Freddy glove under construction, inframing that mimics the opening glove-mak-ing sequence of the original A Nightmare onElm Street. In New Nightmare, however,the scene is then revealed to be taking placeon a movie set, when Wes Craven yells“cut” and calls for more blood. The stability

of “real” as opposed to the fantasy world(here, cinematic fantasy) is undermined yetagain, when Freddy’s glove magically comesto life and what we thought was the “real”/known movie set is shown to be one of Heather Langenkamp’s nightmares whenshe wakes in the (presumably true)“real” world. However, this “real world”is consistently undermined throughout thefilm, because the film we are watching is(paradoxically) also the same film that

Craven is shown writing as part of the storyof New Nightmare, the film we paid money to



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watch. When Langenkamp visits Craven todiscuss his new Elm Street screenplay, theirdialogue is shown to be in the script heis writing in that very scene; when thescript on Craven’s computer screen ends the

scene with “Fade to Black”—the film weare watching dutifully follows. Craven’sauthorial presence within the film similarlyunderscores the discursive quality of theseexperiences, further undermining the stabil-ity of the “known.”

Compared to the earlier forms of the genre,these postmodern horror movies pose a sig-nificant reformulation of the relationship between perception and knowledge. As

we saw, the play between known and un-known in the earlier films put our sensoryperceptions and/or the laws of nature as weunderstand them into crisis. While mostpostmodern horror films still play upon some of these primal fears, because theknown and unknown worlds are both re-vealed to be rhetorical constructs, the two blur together, erasing any meaningful distinc-tion between them. Trying to untangle thetwo (or more?) worlds in a film like Wes

Craven’s New Nightmare is to fight a losing battle. The effect is such that these films seemto suggest that distinctions between a“known” and an “unknown” world are some-what arbitrary, that we can never truly knowthe world around us to begin with. Moreover,the blurring of these boundaries is accentu-ated by the role of (filmic) representationitself. In The Blair Witch Project , for example,an ambiguity is sustained about whether the

Blair Witch exists or not—an ambiguity whichderives from the fact that the (ostensibly)documentary footage shot by the missingfilmmakers is the only source of evidence wehave about what happened to them.

It bears investigation that the recent wave of horror movies continues to draw audiences,apparently providing them with the chills andthrills they expect from the genre. One mightthink that continually reminding viewers thatthey are watching a movie and that the

monster is a rhetorical device would distancethem from the drama and suspense, yet the

popularity of films like Scream and Blair Witchwould seem to suggest otherwise. Indeed, thepleasure of suspense in watching Scream de-rives largely from how the rules of the slasherare explicitly and self-reflexively exposed.

Recent horror’s insistent focus on the cin-ematic medium itself provides the key tounderstanding the shift away from earliermanifestations of the genre. In their represen-tation of both known and unknown worlds asrhetorical constructs, recent horror moviesseem predicated on the belief that knowledgeof the world exists only through mediatedstructures, particularly those of the media it-self, reflecting postmodern theorists’ assertion

that the world possesses no intrinsic, unmedi-ated essence, and the known world therefore(like the unknown) originates in language.One of the central postmodern turns in recentfilms, compared to their predecessors, is thatthe film medium itself becomes more ex-pressly implicated in how we perceive andmake sense of the world. The number of re-cent horror movies focused on the media andits creators underscores this: Wes Craven’sNew Nightmare , The Blair Witch Project , The Last

Broadcast and Urban Legends: Final Cut all cen-ter around filmmakers; the Scream seriesfeatures filmmakers and broadcast journalistsas central characters and sets the final install-ment in Hollywood; Halloween Resurrectionrevolves around a live webcast.

This suspicion that the world cannot beknown outside of mediated structures pro-vides the primary source of horror andsuspense in these films, linking them closely

to Nietzsche’s belief that nature has no laws of its own. Indeed, postmodern horror filmsseem less interested in questioning the laws of nature than the “laws” through which thegenre constructs its world. Scream literalizesthis, as a command of its world demands notso much knowledge of the laws of nature asa mastery of the laws of the slasher film;knowledge of the textual conventions of theslasher film is crucial to the characters’ sur-vival. The film also invites the audience to

mobilize its slasher rhetorical savvy, withmuch of the suspense in the film stemming



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s

from watching the characters being placed in jeopardy because they failed to heed the rules,as evidenced in the prologue where DrewBarrymore is terrorized by threatening phonecalls that focus on the subject of scary movies.

The sequence self-consciously plays uponmany genre clichés, such as Barrymorecontinually walking backwards into poorly litareas that might conceal the killer. Whereasthe play between light and dark in Gothichorror movies like Cat People established a cer-tain relationship between perception andknowledge, in Scream’s prologue we are en-couraged to read such plays on perceptionmore in terms of the rhetorical conventions of

the slasher genre. Concern about the knownworld being threatened by the unknownplays second fiddle to manipulation and sub-version of how slasher movies construct bothworlds. Indeed, at the level of narrativeunfolding and viewer comprehension, Screamoperates as textual game.

By usurping the laws of nature with thelaws of the genre, postmodern horror moviesreflect the media-saturated culture fromwhich they sprang. Most of our knowledge of

the world derives from what we glean fromthe media’s representations of the world; howwe perceive and make sense of experience,then, is in significant measures controlled andconditioned by the media. The possibility thatthe world is actually quite different from itsmedia representation is now a common socialconcern; postmodern horror taps into thesefears. The media steps into the space betweenour sensory perceptions and the world of

appearances, and the notion of the knownworld itself being nothing more than a rhe-torical construct is presented as somethingquite troubling and destabilizing. One of theprimal thrusts of the horror genre is, after all,

the fear of losing control, of being a helplessvictim. In earlier manifestations of the genre,that pertained mostly to the threat attached toloss of control over sensory perceptions or lossof control over the laws of nature. In thepostmodern horror film, loss of control per-tains also to the power of the media over howwe perceive and make sense of the world, thepower of the media to fabricate reality. Assuch, to become an expert in these films re-

quires not so much knowledge of the laws of nature as textual mastery of the genre’s rulesand conventions—mastery over how thegenre constructs its world. To control themedia is to control the world.

When Craven’s Last House on the Leftopened in 1972, the poster instructed patronsto keep repeating to themselves that “it’s onlya movie” if they got too scared, suggestingthat the knowledge of the film as film was re-assuring. By the time of Craven’s Scream ,

however, the notion of “it’s only a movie” is asmuch a source of tension as it is relief. If allperceptions are unreliable and the laws of na-ture little more than a fiction—or, as Nietzscheput it, “everything which is knowable is illu-sion”21—is there a difference between realityand the movies? That this is becoming in-creasing difficult to answer is, it seems, a truesource of anxiety and horror.

Andrew Syder is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. When not working on his dissertation about 1960s psychedelia, he is an aspiringdigital filmmaker.

NOTES

1 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984) 60.2 Ibid , 65.3 David Tepper, “Scream 3: The Death of the Postmodern Slasher Pic?” Culture Kiosque: The European Guide to Arts,

Culture and Entertainment Worldwide <http://www.culturekiosque.com/nouveau/cinema/rhescream.htm> 21March 2000 (Accessed 20 July 2002).



88 FALL 2002

KNOWING THE RULES

4 Harvey O’Brien, Rev. of Scream 2 , Harvey’s Movie Reviews <http://indigo.ie/~obrienh/scm2.htm> 1998 (Accessed20 July 2002).

5 Jürgen Habermas, “The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point,” Postmodernism: A Reader , ThomasDocherty, ed. (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1993) 51-61.

6 Cornel West, “Nietzsche’s Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy,” Early Postmodernism , Paul Bové, ed.(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 265-289.

7

Ibid. , 265-66.8 Gilles Deleuze, “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1990) 253-279.

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’sNotebooks of the Early 1870s (New Jersey; London: Humanities Press International, 1979) 84.

10 Ibid. , 85.11 Ibid. , 87.12 Ibid. , 80.13 See Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1988) 166-184.14 Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment 14:4 (1978) 26.15 Charlene Bunnell, “The Gothic,” Planks of Reason , Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen; London: The Scarecrow Press,

1984) 81.16

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) 25.17 Ibid. , 82.18 One could even argue that horror movies dealing with human monsters follow certain rhetorical patterns, given

that most of us have only ever encountered serial killers and their like on a movie screen. That movie serial killershave acquired certain recognizable characteristics and have even become clichés (e.g. Hannibal Lecter) suggeststhat one could draw up a set of “rules” governing the behavior of serial killers in horror cinema.

19 Several earlier movies do the same for werewolves: in both The Howling (1980) and An American Werewolf in London(1981), characters turn to The Wolf Man (1940) to figure out the rules pertaining to lycanthropes. Similarly, thecharacters in The Return of the Living Dead (1985) rely on their recollections of Night of the Living Dead (1968) to learnhow to kill the brain-eating zombies.

20 In a not dissimilar manner, when watching Van Sant’s Psycho remake we are continuously encouraged to comparethe film to Hitchcock’s version of the same story, revealing Van Sant’s film to be more concerned with textualcomparisons than the creation of a transparent known world. Every aspect of the film is explicitly placed in

quotation marks.21 Nietzsche, 97.



Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series: rhetorical figure of evil.(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)



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