ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven 9781399507028

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part I The Early Wes Craven
1 In Search of Pandora Experimentia
2 Censorship in Liberal Times? The Legacy of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left in Germany
3 The Hills Have Eyes as Folk Horror: a Discursive Approach
4 “Why Are You Doing This!?” Flashbacks in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II
Part II Freddy Krueger and Beyond
5 The American Nightmare Continued: Individualism, Feminism, and Freddy Krueger
6 The “Nightmare” on Elm Street: The Failure and Responsibility of Those in Authority
7 Controlling the Souls in the Machine: Wes Craven Directs for the 1985 Twilight Zone Revival
8 From Friends to Monsters: The Horrors of Technology, Friendship, and the Monsters Next Door in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend
Part III “Craven” in the Mainstream—The “Hollywood” Nightmares of Wes Craven
9 Self-fulfilling Prophecies and Metaphysical Chastisement in The Serpent and The Rainbow
10 Death is Not the End: Electric Dreams and Mass Media Manipulation in Wes Craven’s Shocker
11 The People Under the Stairs at the Intersection of Black Horror and Children’s Horror
12 “I’m a whole other thing”: The People Under the Stairs and Systemic Racism in the Reagan/Bush Era
13 A Nightmare on Video: The Terrors of Home Viewership in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
14 Not Quite Blacula: Locating Vampire in Brooklyn
Part IV Lineage and Legacies
15 The Unlikely Urban Undertaking: Music of the Heart and its Curious Craven Consistencies
16 “Blessed Be America for Letting us Dominate and Pray the Lord Our Soul to Keep.” Wes Craven’s Legacy in The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy
17 “How Meta Can You Get?” Scream 4 and Wes Craven’s Final Nightmares
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven

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ReFocus: The American Directors Series Series Editors: Robert Singer, Frances Smith and Gary D. Rhodes Editorial board: Kelly Basilio, Donna Campbell, Claire Perkins, Christopher Sharrett, and Yannis Tzioumakis

ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of neglected American directors, from the once-famous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture—its myths, values and historical precepts. Titles in the series include: Preston Sturges Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Sarah Kozloff Delmer Daves Edited by Matthew Carter and Andrew Nelson Amy Heckerling Edited by Frances Smith and Timothy Shary Budd Boetticher Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer Kelly Reichardt E. Dawn Hall William Castle Edited by Murray Leeder Barbara Kopple Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan Elaine May Edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum Spike Jonze Edited by Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington Paul Schrader Edited by Michelle E. Moore and Brian Brems John Hughes Edited by Timothy Shary and Frances Smith Doris Wishman Edited by Alicia Kozma and Finley Freibert Albert Brooks Edited by Christian B. Long William Friedkin Steve Choe The Later Films and Legacy of Robert Altman Edited by Lisa Dombrowski and Justin Wyatt Mary Harron Edited by Kyle Barrett Wallace Fox Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Joanna Hearne Richard Linklater Edited by Kim Wilkins and Timotheus Vermeulen Roberta Findlay Edited by Peter Alilunas and Whitney Strub Wes Craven Edited by Calum Waddell edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refoc

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ReFocus The Films of Wes Craven

Edited by Calum Waddell

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization Calum Waddell, 2023 © the chapters their several authors, 2023 Cover image: pictured, left to right, actors Brandon Adams and Sean Whalen at dinner with director Wes Craven on the set of The People Under the Stairs. Courtesy of Sean Whalen. Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0700 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0702 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0703 5 (epub) The right of Calum Waddell to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction Calum Waddell Part I  The Early Wes Craven   1 In Search of Pandora Experimentia Brian R. Hauser   2 Censorship in Liberal Times? The Legacy of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left in Germany Holger Briel   3 The Hills Have Eyes as Folk Horror: a Discursive Approach Mikel J. Koven   4 “Why Are You Doing This!?” Flashbacks in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II Will Dodson Part II  Freddy Krueger and Beyond   5 The American Nightmare Continued: Individualism, Feminism, and Freddy Krueger Sinead Edmonds   6 The “Nightmare” on Elm Street: The Failure and Responsibility of Those in Authority Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk   7 Controlling the Souls in the Machine: Wes Craven Directs for the 1985 Twilight Zone Revival Matthew Sorrento

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17 32 52 70

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  8 From Friends to Monsters: The Horrors of Technology, Friendship, and the Monsters Next Door in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend Norberto Gomez, Jr. Part III “Craven” in the Mainstream—The “Hollywood” Nightmares of Wes Craven   9 Self-fulfilling Prophecies and Metaphysical Chastisement in The Serpent and The Rainbow James Kloda 10 Death is Not the End: Electric Dreams and Mass Media Manipulation in Wes Craven’s Shocker Melody Blackmore 11 The People Under the Stairs at the Intersection of Black Horror and Children’s Horror Catherine Lester 12 “I’m a whole other thing”: The People Under the Stairs and Systemic Racism in the Reagan/Bush Era Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 13 A Nightmare on Video: The Terrors of Home Viewership in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare Max Bledstein 14 Not Quite Blacula: Locating Vampire in Brooklyn Richard Sheppard Part IV  Lineage and Legacies 15 The Unlikely Urban Undertaking: Music of the Heart and its Curious Craven Consistencies Calum Waddell 16 “Blessed Be America for Letting us Dominate and Pray the Lord Our Soul to Keep.” Wes Craven’s Legacy in The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy Erika Tiburcio Moreno 17 “How Meta Can You Get?” Scream 4 and Wes Craven’s Final Nightmares Calum Waddell Filmography Bibliography Index

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149 162 177 190 204 217

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Figures

0.1 0.2 0.3 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1

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The author pictured with Wes Craven and director Steven Mena in Los Angeles, October 2003 The author pictured with Wes Craven in Los Angeles, October 2012 Craven’s most famous creation, Freddy Krueger, would help to define the contemporary horror film The crew of Pandora Experimentia, picture courtesy Ken Lyon Wes Craven embarks on his first film shoot, picture courtesy Ken Lyon Surprisingly it was the representation of the police (played by Martin Kove and Marshall Anker) that also caused censorship problems in Germany David Hess as Krug proved a controversial screen figure The violence in The Last House on the Left kept it censored in Germany for decades The Last House on the Left is now seen as a horror classic With its desert location, The Hills Have Eyes draws on folklore of an older and less settled America Michael Berryman played a memorable villain in The Hills Have Eyes as Pluto Lance Gordon as the sub-humanoid troglodyte Mars, an evocation of the Pagan The Hills Have Eyes launched Wes Craven onto bigger projects Actress Janus Blythe was one of the few original cast members to return for the sequel

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viii  4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2

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Robert Houston returns for a controversial opening sequence which provides extensive flashbacks to the original film A new younger cast headlined the sequel, led by actress Tamara Stafford as Cass Family conflict is central to A Nightmare on Elm Street Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger became a horror film icon in the 1980s Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson has been celebrated as one of the genre’s most resourceful “final girls” Nancy fails to convince her mother that Freddy Krueger is real Tina is an early victim of Freddy’s Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson is victimised by Freddy in the bedroom and in the bathroom, stealing her privacy A young Bruce Willis stars in Shatterday All roads lead to madness in Shatterday Her Pilgrim Soul expanded Craven’s ambitions within the television format Kristy Swanson stars as Samantha in Deadly Friend Although rated R, Deadly Friend shows evidence of starting out as a more family-friendly project, with the presence of the robot BB Despite a promising young cast, Deadly Friend was not a critical or commercial success The Serpent and the Rainbow continues Craven’s presentation of nightmarish dream sequences Bill Pullman was becoming an established leading man when he appeared in The Serpent and the Rainbow The tropical locations of The Serpent of the Rainbow make it unique among Craven’s films Mitch Pileggi’s Horace Pinker was seen as an attempt at a “new” Freddy Krueger-type franchise character Mitch Pileggi would achieve broader fame after Shocker failed at the box office Despite its comical tone, Shocker touches on serious topics such as the death penalty in the United States The presence of Fool as the main character gives The People Under the Stairs potential appeal to a far younger audience than its R-rating suggests The People Under the Stairs was a commercial success for Wes Craven in 1991, with critics praising the performance of Brandon Adams

73 80 88 93 98 103 107 113 119 122 127 134 137 141 150 155 158 164 168 173 178 182

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figures 

11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3 13.1 13.2 13.3 14.1 14.2 14.3 15.1 15.2 15.3 16.1 16.2 16.3 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4

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The People Under the Stairs shows the seedy underbelly of a rich suburban family Among the young cast of The People Under the Stairs is A. J. Langer as the abused and captive Alice Brandon Adams as Fool in The People Under the Stairs is given a demanding child-actor lead role As with Craven’s best work, The People Under the Stairs contains some evocative and terrifying images Wes Craven appears as himself in his New Nightmare One of horror cinema’s most famous “final girls,” actress Heather Langenkamp, returned to her most famous role in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare Actor Robert Englund briefly steps out of the makeup for his seventh film as Freddy Krueger Vampire in Brooklyn was not the critical or commercial success that star Eddie Murphy hoped for Vampire in Brooklyn star Angela Bassett would work with Wes Craven again in Music of the Heart Despite some extravagant special effects, Vampire in Brooklyn never took a bite from the box office Based on a true story, Music of the Heart obtained an Academy Award nomination for its lead actress Meryl Streep Meryl Streep plays enthusiastic violin teacher and hard-working single mother Roberta Guaspari in Music of the Heart Angela Bassett plays Janet Williams, an overworked school principal, in Music of the Heart Films such as The Purge franchise could be seen to owe their lineage to the likes of Craven’s The Last House on the Left The Purge led to a franchise and a television adaptation The blatant use of political imagery is a recurring facet of The Purge franchise Scream saw Craven reinvent the horror film for a new generation Prior to Scream, Craven had dabbled with postmodern elements in his classic Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, starring Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger Actor David Arquette returned for the fourth sequel, simply titled Scream, the first to be made without Craven The Ghostface figure, here pictured in Scream, remains iconic

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187 191 194 201 205 211 213 218 225 226 234 239 243 249 254 259 263 266 270 273

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Notes on Contributors

Melody Blackmore is a PhD Researcher and Part-Time Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University in Film and Cultural Studies. Their PhD examines the symbolic role of landscape as an unconscious space for madness in contemporary horror films. Having received a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and MA Interdisciplinary Psychology, Melody developed over many years researching the role of psychoanalysis in Gothic literature and film. Specialist research areas include psychoanalysis, Gothic literature, the Uncanny, history of insanity, and horror analysis. Max Bledstein teaches film and media at the University of New South Wales, where he completed his PhD thesis on Iranian horror cinema. Several essays based on his thesis have won awards, including the 2022 Graduate Student Award (co-winner) from the Middle East Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the 2021 Graduate Student Writing Award from SCMS’s Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group (SIG), and the 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award from the Horror Studies SIG of SCMS. His work has appeared in Monstrum, Iranian Studies, Inks, The New Americanist, and Jeunesse. He is Web and Social Media Editor for the New Review of Film and Television Studies, and a member of the editorial board of Studies in Comics. Holger Briel is Dean of United International College’s Division of Culture and Creativity, in Zhuhai, China. He holds a PhD in Cultural Theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a BA in English and German from Eberhardt-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany. A portion of his graduate

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studies was also undertaken at the Université de Paris, Sorbonne. He has held numerous visiting Professorships and published many books, articles, and book chapters on media and cultural studies, philosophy, the social sciences, and international management studies. He also remains active as a journalist for several international newspapers. For many years, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the influential IAFOR Journal of Cultural Studies and sits as an Editor and Joint Editor on many journal boards. Furthermore, he is the recipient of many research grants and fellowships, most recently the endowed National South Korean Senior Fellowship in Cultural Studies. In recognition of his expertise in global education, he has been elected to several national education supervisory bodies, including those of Greece, Hungary and Spain and membership in the EU Council for Higher Education. Penny Crofts is a Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney. She is an international expert on criminal law and models of culpability. Her research is cross-disciplinary, drawing upon a range of historical, philosophical, empirical, and literary materials to enrich her analysis of the law. Her research in the area of socio-legal studies, coalescing around issues of justice in criminal law in practice and theory, makes a distinctive contribution to critical evaluations of criminal legal models of culpability and enforcement. Her analysis of criminal legal models of wickedness has contributed to a jurisprudence of blameworthiness. She is currently undertaking a large project entitled ‘Rethinking Institutional Culpability: Criminal Law, Philosophy and Horror’ funded by the Australian Research Council. She wants to note that her work in this edited collection was funded by the Australian Research Council (DE180100577). Will Dodson teaches courses on rhetoric, film, and literature at UNC Greensboro. His essays on Tod Browning, Jess Franco, Hugo Haas, Shirley Jackson, and various film genres have appeared in edited collections and journals including Quarterly Review of Film & Video and Film International. He is the coeditor, with David A. Cook, of The Anthem Series on Exploitation and Industry in Global Cinema, a book series on exploitation films and filmmakers and the various ways in which they have subsidized mainstream cinema and culture. He is the co-editor with Kristopher Woofter of American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021). Sinead Edmonds is a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick and writes on female exploitation film directors. Brian R. Hauser was formerly an Associate Professor of Film at Clarkson University, in the same department in which Wes Craven taught from 1966 to

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1968. His published works include essays on horror in film and television, cinematic adaptation, and micro-budget filmmaking. In addition to his scholarly work, Hauser is a filmmaker, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of a novel about an underground horror filmmaker from the late-1970s, Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows. Norberto Gomez, Jr. is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of technology and mortality as well as popular and digital culture/media. Gomez obtained a PhD in Media, Art, & Text from Virginia Commonwealth University where he studied digital culture, the history of social spaces on the Internet, and the Perl scripting language, ultimately recreating the chatroom of their teenage years, L.A. Live Chat. A practising and exhibiting visual artist, Gomez also received an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Houston. Gomez is the co-founder and editor of Sybil Press, a small print press specializing in handmade artist books, works of theory, esotericism, cultural, and heretical bricolage, among other experiments. In 2013, Sybil Press published Gomez’s The Book of Cannibals—a grimoire for the contemporary artist and consumer—an experimental artist book and work of theory featuring illustrations by the author. His essay, “Eva Rocha: Digital Desaparecido in the Postinternet,” is featured in Digital Encounters: Envisioning Connectivity in Latin American Cultural Production (2023). Gomez has also written for Blumhouse, Cvlt Nation, Digital America, and Fangoria Magazine. Recent art exhibitions include Box 13 (Houston, Texas), Rhizome D.C. (Washington, D.C.), Little Berlin (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), (e)merge Art Fair (Washington, D.C.), and C.I.C.A. Museum (South Korea). He is currently Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Montgomery College (Maryland, USA). For more information, visit www.norbertogomezjr.com James Kloda is an independent film scholar and journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as The Dark Side magazine. He has written for a range of outlets on The Exorcist sequels, Roman Polanski, cinemas of cruelty, and the final girl trope, and intends to pursue an academic career in the near future. Mikel J. Koven is the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (2006), Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (2008), and Blaxploitation Films (2010). He holds a PhD in Folklore Studies and has published extensively on the relationship between folklore and popular cinema. Catherine Lester is a Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham. Her research centres on the intersections of children’s culture

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and the horror genre, which is the subject of her monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (2021). She is editor of the collection Watership Down: Perspectives on and Beyond Animated Violence (2023), and has also published chapters on Disney princess films and children’s horror television. Richard Sheppard is a writer, restauranteur, and podcaster, currently finishing his MRes. at the University of East Anglia, researching a series of films released in 1981, the ‘year of the werewolf ’. His fiction can be found in the 18th Wall anthologies Shadows Over Avalon and Sockhops and Seances, as well as in in The Book of the Sea. He is also the host and co-producer of the Hallowed Histories podcast and The Constant Reader Podcast—the former deals with East Anglian folklore, the latter with the life and works of Stephen King. Matthew Sorrento is editor-in-chief of Film International and teaches film and media studies at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., USA. He is coeditor, with David Ryan, of David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (2022) and has chapters forthcoming on Sam Raimi, Richard Brooks’s The Brothers Karamazov, and David Lynch’s The Grandmother. He has contributed to The Middle West Review, Critical Studies in Television, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Sorrento’s current research includes pulp writer David Goodis, independent filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, and the horror anthology series Channel Zero. Erika Tiburcio-Moreno is a professor of History at the University of Carlos III, where she teaches courses in Contemporary and Cultural History, Spanish Culture, and Visual History. She has published articles and reviews in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, Brumal: revista de investigación de lo fantástico, Fotocinema. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, among others. She is also the author of Y nació el asesino en serie. El origen cultural del monstruo en el cine de terror estadounidense. Her fields of expertise are Popular Culture and Contemporary History, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, and Horror Cinema. Honni van Rijswijk is a graduate of Sydney Law School and received her PhD from the University of Washington, where she was a Fellow in the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Her research is interdisciplinary, and she writes primarily at the intersections of law, literature, and critical theory. She has published on feminist theories of harm, formulations of responsibility in law and literature, and the role of history in the common law.

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Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is a four-time nominee for the Bram Stoker Award and the author and editor of over twenty-five books and 100 articles and book chapters. He is the author of Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, Devil’s Advocates: The Conjuring, Eaters of the Dead, and The Theology of Battlestar Galactica, among others. He is a Professor at Loyola Marymount University and a Los Angeles-based actor, director, and stage combat choreographer.

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Introduction Calum Waddell

W

es Craven will probably be best known to even the least dedicated follower of horror cinema for his work on the blockbuster Scream series (beginning in 1996), or as the father of Freddy Krueger, who first appeared in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), spawning a series of sequels and a remake. His demonic creation, played by Robert Englund, was one of the most recognisable figures of the 1980s—so much so that the fan club devoted to the notorious dream-stalker had at its peak “more members than U2’s.”1 As this edited collection will ascertain, however, there is so much more than “just” these accepted canonical horror classics to this fascinating filmmaker’s oeuvre. In fact, for four decades Craven retained his position as someone who made a number of prolific, wide-release, theatrical attractions—no small feat, and almost unique amongst his contemporaries who also became associated with (to borrow from the late Robin Wood) the “American Nightmare” of the 1970s (i.e., Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, George Romero).2 The director, born August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio and passing away on August 30, 2015, was, at the beginning of his filmmaking career, very much a marginalized option, even for hardened horror film fans. Writing about his work in Danse Macabre, no less than Stephen King would comment: “if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others. The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of porno violence.”3 King was referring to Craven’s first two feature films, The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), both of which were commercially successful but aesthetically and thematically transgressive: depicting grueling sexual violence but humanized, even horribly relatable, “monsters.” Lest we dismiss King’s concerns outright, as late as 1992 the oft-revered fan writer Chas Balun was chastising the former shocker as

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Figure 0.1  The author pictured with Wes Craven and director Steven Mena (furthest left) in Los Angeles, October, 2003

“sordid . . . one of the most repugnant ‘horror’ films ever made,”4 an almost unthinkable critique when related to a debut of such humanity, intelligence, and provocation. Unsurprisingly, many of the writers who contributed to this volume choose to reference the words of the late Robin Wood—who gave Craven a leading role in his theory of the “American Nightmare.” The scholar would note how Craven, along with his contemporaries, produced groundbreaking work that featured “oblique, commentaries on Vietnam and its impact on the structures of American society.”5 Wood would also offer Queer and Marxist readings that, especially for the time, were groundbreaking insofar as taking “lowbrow” exploitation films and legitimizing them as narratives of radical subtext, with Craven at the forefront. Unfortunately, years later and the Canadian academic would also chastise the director’s later undertakings, particularly A Nightmare on Elm Street, having himself aged into vocal dislike of such supposed teen-slasher morality-plays.6 One might argue, however, that a filmmaker able to oversee output that defines one generation to the next (no easy task) was, inevitably, going to confuse the “old guard.”7 In truth: Craven’s concerns and politics feel remarkably consistent throughout his various decades and years. Nonetheless, despite a number of special edition Blu-ray releases,8 the period between Craven’s low budget success with The Hills Have Eyes and

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then his bigger breakout with A Nightmare on Elm Street has not been as acclaimed or discussed—although the director’s decision to move into television (explored in this book with his work on The Twilight Zone) was, arguably, ahead of its time. Perhaps using the format as a way to rethink and even rationalize, for a more mainstream viewership, the themes of his—to quote again from Balun—“hard-core, uncompromisingly brutal”9 early work, gave him the confidence and skills that was required to oversee A Nightmare on Elm Street as something “other” than another gory teen-kill attraction. Thus, the director would also, with efforts such as A Stranger in Our House (1978), Invitation to Hell (1984), and his Twilight Zone output, retain his focus on his recurring key aspects of the family, privilege, suburbia, and wealth (all sent into a tailspin by horrific occurrences), but without the “grindhouse grime”10 of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. Indeed, per Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Had The Last House on the Left not been so vicious and so widely abhorred, its skillful execution might have established Wes Craven as a member of the New Hollywood generation.”11 Amanda Chapman Boczar rightly criticises America’s Vietnam War films for their presentation of women, specifically Vietnamese sexual availability (as well as their depiction as voiceless victims of rape in American “tragedy” narratives): “prostitutes, victimized village women and girls, or fierce ‘dragon ladies,’ working covertly for the North Vietnamese.” Attesting, one might argue, to Craven’s effectiveness at channelling the “Vietnam nightmare” with these two remarkable early films is, quite possibly, that he resisted trying to recapture jungle warfare and the loss of youth in the wilds of Southeast Asia. Instead, Craven metaphorically brought the carnage, confusion, and violence of that doomed struggle “home” and painstakingly reconstructed what home invasion, the loss of family members, and sexual brutality might look like, with harrowing verisimilitude.12 The trauma of Vietnam also haunted Craven’s post-70s work—as discussed in the episode on A Nightmare on Elm Street in the hit series The Movies That Made Us (2019–), it was the nightmares of Cambodian and Laotian refugees in America, some of whom reportedly passed away in their sleep following their stories of intense, recurring bad dreams surrounding their past, including the tragedy of war and experience under regimes such as the Khmer Rouge, that inspired the Freddy Krueger figure. A “bogeyman” who seeks to destroy the very white suburbs that had passively watched the Vietnam War on their television sets, reported as just that American tragedy, rather than one destabilizing an entire region. The chapters that follow thus make a case for the late “master of horror” as not only an unrivalled influence within the genre (which few, one is akin to imagine, would debate), but as an essential American filmmaker in general.Craven’s own ambition to “move on” from the visceral nature of his initial projects (which include his solitary directorial outing—that we know of—in hardcore pornography, The

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Fireworks Woman, also known as Angela The Fireworks Woman, released in 1975 but credited to writer-director “Abe Snake”) is undoubtedly seen in the more restrained interpersonal conflicts of theatrical releases such as Deadly Blessing (1981) and Swamp Thing (1982), the latter of which must have seemed like a legitimate crossover project given the success of another DC comic book tie-in, Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, 1978). Unfortunately, the superheromeets-monster-movie mash-up was notably damaged by being “underbudgeted”13 or, per at least one critic, “the creature is another guy in a lousy rubber suit.”14 Bruce Williamson in Playboy magazine was equally scathing: “bottomof-bill malarky.”15 A similar critical and commercial fate would befall the sequel, The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984), but Craven finally managed to instigate his initial, provocative thematic concepts into a glossier stylistic approach with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which bleeds in vibrant colour schemes, surrealistic atmospherics and ambitious special effects work, but retains the uncomfortable destruction of white picket-fence idealism that defines his 70s classics. It is, arguably, the director’s greatest achievement; described by Adam Rockoff as “one of the last great horror films and a work of art.”16 Shortly after his passing, Stuart Heritage in The Guardian would write that “Wes Craven reinvented horror three times: cinema looks scary without him” and add, “Scream would be the last time that Wes Craven would reinvigorate horror. Where it’ll go without him is anyone’s guess.”17 Such a statement only further attests to the director’s importance, perhaps recognized a little too late. Yet while Craven would have to wait until Scream (1996) to once again be at the forefront of the pop culture zeitgeist, it would be a mistake to argue that in the post-Freddy landscape he struggled to retain his relevance to the genre he remained attached to. After a return to television with Chiller (1985), a quartet of flawed but fascinating projects ensued: Deadly Friend (1986), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987), Shocker (1989), and some involvement with the story and screenplay for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), which saw the director tackling a series of admirably radical ideas during the latter part of the 80s. Respectively, these include domestic abuse and technological violence, colonial attitudes and legacies, capital punishment, and a Freudian interpretation (and understanding) of dreams, the id and “self ” battling for prominence amongst abused, misunderstood, and vulnerable teenagers. Not all of these efforts were warmly received, with one critic remarking that a scene in which a “head is splattered by a basketball” is the only reason to bother watching Deadly Friend.18 In all due respect, this publication disagrees—and contains some chapters that make arguments for the rediscovery and re-evaluation of the director’s less discussed output. As the last decade of the twentieth century rolled forward, Craven barely paused for breath. Three attempts to create small-screen franchises—with

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Night Visions (1990), Nightmare Café (1992), and as a producer on Laurel Canyon (1993)—failed to find prime-time, but the director remained in his element with the racial and suburban politics of The People Under the Stairs (1991). This sharp, but violent, satire was followed-up by the postmodern sequel Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), a damning commentary on what happens when society fails to discuss its more turbulent past (tellingly Craven also produced a TV movie on the Kent State shootings in 1981) rather than the expected straightforward “slasher” sequel that Freddy Krueger followers may have expected, and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), an urban update on the blaxploitation trendsetter Blacula (William Crain, 1972). Thus, from Deadly Friend in 1986 until Vampire in Brooklyn in 1995, an unmistakably creative mind, unafraid of pushing new boundaries and exploring fresh concepts, is clearly operating. Certainly, had any other director been responsible for such an entertaining number of motion pictures, in such fast order, and across just a decade, it is probable that they would—at the bare minimum—achieve rightful celebration among horror film audiences and scholars (for reference consider Charles B. Pierce, Jeff Lieberman, or Gary Sherman). However, Craven was almost his own worst enemy: setting the standard so high with his influential and immediate The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, that supposedly “lesser” undertakings have faded from popular view, at least in comparison. With the success of Scream, followed by the inevitable sequels (initially in 1997 and then in 2000), a brief diversion from more familiar “scary movie” territory was provided by the Oscar-nominated Music of the Heart (1999) and the more Hitchcockian subtlety of Red Eye (2005). In 2006, he would even author a segment, “Pere-Lachaise”, to the anthology project Paris, je t’aime (2006), a whimsical, romantic interlude about an engaged couple from England who visit the grave of Oscar Wilde. The unavoidable movement of time, however, is expressed in the restrained, autumnal colors and the graveyard location, although a touch of hope, from a figure with less than a decade of life ahead, comes from the appearance of Wilde’s ghost—an indicator that the filmmaker, who wrestled with themes of cheating death via antagonists such as Freddy Krueger and Horace Pinker, might have retained some optimism about spirit and soul. When I first met Wes Craven, I was only in my mid-twenties, on an internship in Los Angeles but moonlighting for UK horror magazines, such as the now defunct Shivers, as their journalist “on the scene.” The director was struggling with Cursed (eventually released in 2005), the shooting had come to a halt, the Academy Award winning makeup artist Rick Baker (most famous for An American Werewolf in London [John Landis, 1981]) had quit and Miramax, then the label of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, was demanding substantial reshoots. Craven was not shy about discussing Cursed, as well as his anger and exhaustion with the production process, and he could be found attending screenings or generally just “hanging out” at the annual Scream Fest Horror Film Festival, where

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he also hosted Q and A sessions after The Hills Have Eyes and (a short-notice screening of) Scream. Not only did I get to interview him, but in that short time I also saw the director almost daily, engaging in occasional small-talk and a few passing “hellos”, as he held time at the bar or lobby with much-missed legends of the form such as Tobe Hooper and Stan Winston. It was, I hasten to add, an inspirational (even emotional) experience—not least of all because Craven would almost always accept my requests for interviews over the forthcoming years and even gave me a follow when he joined Twitter. My last encounter with the director came in 2012, when we filmed him for new UK Blu-ray editions of The People Under the Stairs and Deadly Blessing in Los Angeles. Feeling I could finally “ask” for an autograph, he was kind enough to sign a few DVD covers, including that of his “forgotten” sequel The Hills Have Eyes Part II. While Cursed would finally appear in 2005, remaining the weakest of Craven’s output, a return to teenagers-in-peril and suburban chaos/familial secrets arrived with My Soul to Take in 2010, belatedly transformed into a 3D “attraction” but failing to excite the box office. It may well have been this unfortunate (and unwarranted19) reception, critically and commercially, that convinced Craven to work with producer Bob Weinstein for a final time and oversee Scream 4 (2011). Perhaps most frustratingly, we never got to see Craven’s take on the Donald

Figure 0.2  The author pictured with Wes Craven in Los Angeles, October 2012

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Trump years of American politics—but he did ensure a future for Ghostface, one of his most iconic characters. A Scream television series would debut in 2015 and a new sequel would even surface in 2022. It is also almost certain that a further Freddy Krueger venture, after the failed 2010 attempt to reboot the franchise from director Samuel Bayer, will emerge in the not-too-distant future as well, only indicating the legacy that Craven has left behind. questions of the

“auteur”

As with other entries in the ReFocus series, this collection places Craven frontand-center of his directorial projects. They might be mentioned, but there is minimal analysis and consideration given to the works that he produced/ executive-produced—most famously Mind Ripper (Joe Gayton, 1995), Wishmaster (Robert Kurtzman, 1997), Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000), Feast (John Gulager, 2006), The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006), and The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009). Some of these releases would inspire franchises of their own (Dracula 2000 and Feast spawned two more films, Wishmaster would inspire three sequels, and The Hills Have Eyes obtained a follow-up just one year later), but they remain located outside of what might be viewed as Craven’s control. This argument is not to disagree with the fact that the director himself would meet with interference from his producers, most famously on Cursed, resulting in projects that failed his expectations. Nor is it to deny that he would voice disappointment regarding some of his endeavors. Rather, it is to maintain that Craven was still required to oversee the reshoots of Cursed20 and that, for better or worse, when not writing his own material, he almost always gravitated towards recurring themes: suburbia, the family unit (and its breakdown), Otherness, class conflict, the dehumanizing nature of violence—at its most literal expressed in the burned, monstrous visage of Englund’s Krueger. At its most basic, then, Craven could be seen (when he was not also directing from his own screenplay) to represent what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson would acknowledge as someone who “usually did not literally write scripts but managed nonetheless to stamp his or her personality on studio products, transcending the constraints of Hollywood’s standardized system.”21 Or, states Peter Wollen, “Of course, some individual directors have always been recognised as outstanding: Charles Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles. The auteur theory does not limit itself to acclaiming the director as the main author of a film. It implies an operation of decipherment; it reveals authors where none had been seen before. For years, the model of an author in the cinema was that of the European director, with open artistic aspirations and full control over his films.”22 Mentioning Craven in the same breath as Chaplin, Ford, or Welles will seem absurd to many,

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but the auteur discussion—in relation to American film—almost certainly acknowledges that some artists can or could at least instigate, build, and conclude a series of texts that “read” as an evolution of their interests and thoughts. The Ford who made The Searchers (1956) is a changed man from the Ford who made Stagecoach (1939), but 1) seventeen years is a long time; and 2) we can at least trace ideas, perspectives, and even characters from one to the other, cementing both as a legacy of his art. Did Craven also fit this ideal? He worked within a less lavish (even respected) genre, of course, with only a few exceptions, and did not always succeed in channeling his thematic concerns—as the lack of contemporary celebration given to “lesser” works such as A Stranger in Our House, Swamp Thing, Deadly Friend, or Vampire in Brooklyn might indicate. Furthermore, while Craven’s work, following The Last House on the Left, always looks professional, it would be difficult to find an aesthetic consistency that makes, say, The Hills Have Eyes Part II concurrent with Invitation to Hell, let alone the glossier, later likes of Shocker. Truffaut and Sarris may have instigated a concept that, at least commercially, has become accepted (seen in the “Wes Craven Presents” moniker of even forgotten direct-to-video material such as the remake of Carnival of Souls [Peter Grossman, 1998]), but—not without reason—authors, critics, and researchers have pointed to the collaborative nature of the film form.23 Ian Craven and Richard Maltby, for instance, have noted that the aesthetic design of Citizen Kane can be attributed to “the combined work of Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland.”24 Echoing this point, Bordwell and Thompson would also propose how “the author is no longer a person but . . . a system of relations among several films bearing the same signature.”25 Indeed, I addressed this concept of “auteur” identity myself when I wrote The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film 1959–1977,26 stating of films such as The Last House on the Left: “I have argued against an auteurist reading of the films themselves because the obligation to exploit specific generic spectacle maintains exploitation as a fastidiously commercial form. The auteur of the exploitation film is neither the director nor the producer but rather the market itself.”27 Craven, not unlike contemporaries such as David Cronenberg, George Romero, John Waters, Peter Watkins, or Doris Wishman, began his career working on small projects where certain freedoms were almost certainly permitted—as seen by how visceral both The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes are—and there is no doubt that he also proved himself to be a savvy businessman. The filmmaker, like many of his contemporaries, navigated the waters of increasingly bigger projects, but nonetheless did so (and this is the contentious part) without ever completely losing the thematic “touch” that makes even his lesser efforts stand out. The Craven “brand,” then, or “signature” is part of what makes the director so fascinating, and indeed flawed, or to quote film critic Kim Newman: “a gutsy

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independent [who has] since had a hard time hacking it in the mainstream.”28 While a more recognized auteur such as Ford transitioned across decades, seemingly without too much struggle regarding quality control, the “Craven touch” met many bumps along the road. Not that this has stopped academics from considering the filmmaker within this contentious auteur proposition.29 Thus, tracing Craven’s work, from The Last House on the Left through to Scream 4, perhaps poses questions of a more professional journeyman, who finally cracks the Hollywood A-list and makes his mark with two successful franchises, complete with action figures and related merchandise. However, this is, one is inclined to state, also unfair. Instead—as this collection of chapters shows—what we can see in the late director is a remarkable struggle to formulate and voice that all-important “return of the repressed,” which Wood so eloquently detailed as part of his American Nightmare. That this element never disappeared, from 1972 until 2011, with even Scream 4 detailing how a return to the site of trauma risks unleashing new scars (literally and metaphorically), is a proposal for—at the very least—the “author’s” desire to find and fulfil stories that express something more personal. It is for this reason, one can at the very least conclude, that authors would question where the horror film would go without him. This factor alone is, surely, a “signature” worth relishing. Indeed, although Craven would never confirm he directed The Fireworks Woman, the aforementioned hard-core film that he also appears in (in a non-sexual role playing the Devil, a carny nod to his involvement in the exploitation film underground), even this austerity-budgeted entry in his cinematic CV finds a link to later projects such as The People Under the Stairs (with its use of incest and BDSM) and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (arguing that what society keeps repressed can only return as an even more dangerous, and in this case salacious, “fantasy”). collective nightmares

This collection is split into four parts. The first begins with a discussion of Craven’s early work, initiated not by The Last House on the Left, but by the director’s very first film project of any kind, Pandora Experimentia, made in the late 1960s and potentially representing the spark that led the director down a new path in his life. Author Brian R. Hauser offers some fascinating research into this lost but important piece of the wider puzzle surrounding how and why the filmmaker, and former humanities lecturer, became inspired to dedicate his life to the cinema. Regarding The Last House on the Left, possibly Craven’s most written-about project, this publication takes a different approach to the infamous classic, with Professor Holger Briel tracing its censorship in Germany and using this journey to rethink some of the elements that made this most influential of debuts so controversial—and indeed contentious. His findings are

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thought-provoking and perhaps even indicate how a most American nightmare was nonetheless prescient enough to upset even the moral guardians of other liberal democracies.30 Mikel J. Koven, who has used folk horror as a prism through which to read the Italian giallo trend in his acclaimed monograph La Dolce Morte,31 tackles The Hills Have Eyes through a similar methodology. Instigating Craven’s second horror achievement into the “folk horror” canon is no small feat, but Koven makes a compelling argument for this to be the case—providing bold new insight into this groundbreaking shocker. Rounding out the first part of this collection is Will Dodson’s analysis of The Hills Have Eyes Part II, including its oft-criticized “flashback” scenes, with the writer proposing that this maligned follow-up be given a contemporary reappraisal and placed within some of Craven’s more familiar anxieties. Although The Hills Have Eyes Part II would be the last film the director made before his “break” with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and a gradual evolution into bigger-budgeted studio productions, Dodson offers a sense of closure, and even grandeur, with his enthusiasm for this austerity-priced sequel. Part II of this edited collection, “Freddy Krueger and Beyond,” follows the emergence of a more commercial, and perhaps even confident, Craven voice both with and immediately following his sleeper success in 1984. “The American Nightmare Continued: Individualism, Feminism, and Freddy Krueger” from Sinead Edmonds debates Robin Wood’s dismissal of the director’s output, following The Hills Have Eyes. Primarily using the character of Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy— and her recurring trauma at the hands of her parents and Robert Englund’s iconic antagonist—Edmonds affirms that A Nightmare on Elm Street, far from being another mere teen-slasher in a decade awash with such tropes, actively continues

Figure 0.3  Craven’s most famous creation, Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund and here pictured in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare [Rachel Talalay, 1991]), would help to define the contemporary horror film

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the themes of the “American Nightmare” into a new, equally troubled, generation. The knife-gloved killer is also the focus of “The ‘Nightmare’ on Elm Street: The Failure and Responsibility of Those in Authority” from Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk, which builds discussion around how authority itself fails the characters of this popular, sequel-spanning suburban horror story. Following A Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven accepted television work for a new rendition of The Twilight Zone, and it is this unusual diversion that Matthew Sorrento looks at, exposing how the director expressed themes of his past, and future, work in episodes that—despite being less well-known than his major projects—nonetheless fit comfortably into his impressive oeuvre. Following The Twilight Zone, the filmmaker moved onto Deadly Friend, another Elm Street-style suburban tragedy, but with considerably higher production values. Nonetheless, this repetition of his then-recent hit film is given a new chance to stake its relevance and worth courtesy of Norberto Gomez, Jr., whose acknowledgement of the wider technological chaos of Craven’s narratives—and of the decade as a whole—suggests that Deadly Friend was a potent expression of the fears around modern life and its increasing dependence upon a computerized age. The prolific genre figurehead would follow Deadly Friend with decisions that saw him work within a more accessible palette than ever before. It is for this reason that Part III of this collection, “‘Craven’ in the Mainstream—The ‘Hollywood’ Nightmares of Wes Craven,” begins with a look at The Serpent and the Rainbow, which might be seen as a new dawn—of sorts—for the director, taking him away from both the rural and the suburban, and attempting to find fresh, and perhaps even glossier, landscapes for his dark, thematic concepts. James Kloda, whose background is in film criticism rather than academia, offers a well-considered discussion of how The Serpent and the Rainbow relates to aspects of adaptation, time, place, and—perhaps more importantly—a very foreign “Otherness.” Melody Blackmore then looks at media manipulation and the capital punishment theme of Shocker—which, following the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, had Craven try to “sell” audiences on another supernaturally-themed, and personable, fantasy serial-killer. Although Shocker was not well-received (dubbed by Balun to be “molar-grinding”32), Blackmore offers praise for how the director reimagines some of his previous themes in order to address new concepts such as the “video nasty” and sensationalistic news reporting. With The People Under the Stairs in 1991, Craven had a commercially successful start to the new decade, even if this particular motion picture has lost some of its profile given the later blockbuster impact of Scream. As such, it is appreciated to see two different perspectives on this satirical, but still occasionally gruesome, effort. In her chapter on the film, Catherine Lester, author of Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema,33 discusses what might be seen as a more “adult fairy tale” within the context of other

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horror feature films that have been produced for a considerably younger audience. In doing so, Lester concludes that The People Under the Stairs might benefit from being seen within a fresh context that even challenges the traditional “whiteness” of the director’s work. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. also addresses race in his analysis of this text, with a riveting address of how The People Under the Stairs challenged the systemic discrimination that some argue was prevalent during the Bush-Reagan era—a factor that was especially relevant to the Los Angeles of the film’s setting, back in 1991. Finally, concluding just before the emergence of Ghostface in 1996, Part III of the book closes with Max Bledstein’s discussion of the many complexities inherent in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, followed by Richard Sheppard’s retrospective on Vampire in Brooklyn. The latter piece of writing argues that Craven, having begun to experiment more explicitly with postmodernism, might also have been seen to channel and subvert some of the thematic elements of William Crain’s blaxploitation template Blacula (1972). Robin Wood claims that Wes Craven, still early in his career, told him that he wanted “to make films that engaged directly and progressively with social issues.”34 For the final section of this addition to the ReFocus series, “Lineage and Legacies,” I argue that these “social issues” have generally stayed the same— even if the director might have transitioned from lower budgets to higher ones, and from horror to melodrama. Using his only Oscar-nominated film, Music of the Heart, as an example of this, I give Craven’s most blatantly mainstream outing consideration within the wider body of his other core works, while also addressing how its “dreams come true” concept permits for an unusually warm viewing experience. Following this chapter is “Blessed Be America for Letting us Dominate and Pray the Lord Our Soul to Keep. Wes Craven’s Legacy in The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy” by Erika Tiburcio Moreno, which highlights how, even after his passing, the director’s concepts and classic fear-scapes continued to launch new American horror franchises. Finally, I bring this collection to its conclusion with an analysis of Scream 4 (2011), arguing that Craven’s final film not only further subverted some of the remaining stock elements of the teen-slasher template, but subtly established a future for the series—beyond its director’s own life. notes   1. Ian Conrich, “Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films,” in Alain Silver and James Ursini, The Horror Film Reader (Limelight Editions, New York, 2004), 231.   2. The only exception, one might argue, is John Carpenter.   3. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (Warner Books, 1981), 229.   4. Chas Balun, The Connoisseurs Guide to the Contemporary Horror Film (Fantaco Books, New York, 1992), 39—a strange comment for the critic to make in a book which lauds the likes of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) and Dr. Butcher M.D. (Marino Girolami, 1980).

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  5. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986), 133.   6. Robin Wood, “What Lies Beneath?” in Schneider, Steven Jay, Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004).   7. Wood might even be seen to fall into what Jancovich notes as “It is also the case that critics often take one period as representative of a genre as a whole, and develop their theories of generic essences from these particular instances.” Mark Jancovich, Horror: The Film Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), 8.   8. I myself produced some of the additional content for the UK disc of The People Under the Stairs (1991) in 2013, Deadly Blessing (1981) in 2014, and for Swamp Thing (1982) in 2018, and The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984) received a special edition from Arrow Video in Britain in 2020.   9. Balun, The Connoisseurs Guide to the Contemporary Horror Film, 35. 10. I admit to using the term “grindhouse” somewhat loosely and colloquially here, but mainly in relationship to the aesthetic of each film. For a recent discussion of the term and its various connotations, see David Church, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2016). For what I dub “the exploitation film style” see my own The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film, 1959–1977 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 11. Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Wes Craven: Thinking Through Horror,” Film Quarterly (Vol. 69, No. 2, Winter, 2015), 75. 12. Amanda Chapman Boczar, “Economics, Empathy, and Expectation—History and Representation of Rape and Prostitution in Late 1980s Vietnam War Films,” in Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Catriona McAvoy, Selling Sex On Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015). 13. Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies (Bloomsbury, London, 1988), 57. 14. L. A. Morse, Video Trash & Treasures (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1989), 64. 15. Bruce Williamson, “Movies,” Playboy (April 23, 1982), 30. 16 Adam Rockoff, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1996 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2002), 155. 17. Stuart Heritage, “Wes Craven Reinvented Horror Three Times: Cinema Looks Scary Without Him,” The Guardian (August 31, 2015), www. theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/ aug/31/wes-craven-reinvented-horror-three-times-cinema-looks-scary-without-him 18. James O’Neill, Terror on Tape: A Complete Guide to Over 2,000 Horror Movies on Video (New York: Billboard Books, 1994), 175. 19. With a fantastic young cast, a thrilling first act, and even a curious, if somewhat understated finale, My Soul to Take is a fine contemporary slasher film. 20. I had confirmation of this from Craven when interviewing him for the release of Red Eye in 2005: “Cursed took me two years. I finished it and then they wanted another 40 days of shooting and then there was the filming of another two acts to end the movie and then, finally, they went and cut it down to a PG13. It was just not the way to make a movie . . . the script for Red Eye was great and we actually overlapped with Cursed—this movie went into pre-production while I was still doing some re-shoots.” In “The Man Who Scared the World,” Dreamwatch magazine (London: Titan Publishing, Issue 132, 2005), 35. 21. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 461. 22. Peter Wollen, “The Film Artist,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory & Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 456. 23. One recommends Márk Langer’s “Tabu: The Making of a Film,” in Cinema Journal (Vol. 24, No. 3, 1985), 43–64, which aptly indicates the chaos of finding “authorship” even within a motion picture instigated by two recognized pioneers.

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24. Ian Craven and Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Blackwell, Oxford, 1995), 179. 25. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGrawHill, 2001), 39. 26. Edinburgh University Press (2018). 27. Ibid., 189. 28. Newman. Nightmare Movies, 57. 29. As well as Robin Wood, one might want to consider Hills, Matt, “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures,” in Sconce, Jeffrey, Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007), 231. 30. Before it was a “video nasty”, the film was rejected outright by the BBFC in the UK in 1974. David Kerekes and David Slater, See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy (Manchester: Critical Vision, 2001), 24. 31. Mikel Koven, La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (Scarecrow Press, London, 2006). 32. Chas Balun, More Gore Score: Brave New Horrors (Florida: Fantasma Books, 1992), 59. 33. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 34. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, 133.

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part i

The Early Wes Craven

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chapter

1

In Search of Pandora Experimentia Brian R. Hauser

F

or the majority of Wes Craven’s biographers, the director’s film career begins with his 1972 feature The Last House on the Left. A few, such as the documentarian Thommy Hutson, note his early days learning editing while working for Harry Chapin.1 Craven himself also occasionally revealed his early work on various adult films (see for instance his appearance in Inside Deep Throat [Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, 2005]). However, the filmmaker’s first effort was actually a 45-minute student project for which he was Director of Photography while he was a faculty member at Clarkson College of Technology (CCT) in 1968. Curiously, Craven often tells or remembers the details of this experience incorrectly and even inconsistently. For instance, in one interview he recalls the title of this film as The Searchers, when in fact its name was the much more striking Pandora Experimentia.2 These erroneous details concerning Craven’s early filmmaking experiences give us a curious picture of the development of one of the most influential horror auteurs of the twentieth century. Craven’s brief sojourn in New York’s North Country is no secret, but certain details have taken on the character of legend, especially locally. In the late 1960s, he was a Professor of Humanities who held an MA from Johns Hopkins University. Although Craven only taught at Clarkson for two years, from 1966 to 1968, his time there has provided fodder for a local story concerning the origins of one of his best-known films, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Like other towns in the United States, Potsdam does have an Elm Street; it is one of the main downtown roads, and it skirts the northern edge of what was the college’s main campus in the 1960s. It has long been part of new students’ informal orientation to Clarkson that they hear the story of how Craven helped some undergraduates make a parody-horror film called (you guessed it) A Nightmare on Elm Street; that the boiler room of Old Snell Hall inspired Freddy’s boiler room scenes, and that the former Theta Chi fraternity house at 10 Elm Street

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was popularly known as the “Elm Street House” and had been used as a location in the student project.3 In 2010, there was even a brief and unsuccessful campaign to save this building from demolition by playing on its tenuous connection with Craven’s legacy. The problem with all of this, as with many urban legends, is that virtually none of it is true. Though Wes Craven has passed away, a more accurate version of his early film years and the making of Pandora Experimentia still exists by virtue of the students who made it with him (Ken Lyon, John Heneage, and Rob McConaghy), corroborated with and supplemented by various archival materials and the interviews the director also did with authors like Thommy Hutson, John Wooley, and Jason Zinoman.4 The story that these sources tell is a fascinating and unexpected slice of underground film history from a time and place that few would have expected to launch such an important “master of horror.” The setting for most of this story is Clarkson College of Technology, a STEM5-focused school nestled in the middle of New York’s North Country in the village of Potsdam. Clarkson was and is an institution best known for training engineers. There is no film school there, and while SUNY Potsdam is the state university system’s music and arts conservatory campus, there never has been a thriving local filmmaking culture. Film historians have chronicled the underground movie scenes in Baltimore, Florida, Los Angeles, New York City,

Figure 1.1  The crew of Pandora Experimentia (Wes Craven furthest left), picture courtesy Ken Lyon

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Pittsburgh, and San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s,6 but there is understandably less information about the kinds of shorts and features that were being created in more out of the way places across the country. Nevertheless, the same relatively inexpensive consumer motion picture technology that made those other underground film scenes possible was also available elsewhere. Though home movies were probably more likely to be shot in regular 8mm and Super-8 formats, a wide variety of consumer-grade 16mm film cameras and film were available to the public. In 1968, Wes Craven owned a wind-up Revere C-103 16mm camera. Craven was looking for an opportunity to become a filmmaker, and a couple of undergraduates at Clarkson provided the opportunity. Though always a small village, Potsdam did not hide away from the counterculture and the bohemian atmosphere evident across American colleges in the 1960s. The village sported two student-run coffee houses (The Pendulum and The Cider Jug), where scholars and other locals could drink coffee and listen to live music and poetry readings. Potsdam also boasted a number of wellknown musical acts such as Pete Seeger, Jefferson Airplane, and The Yardbirds. Clarkson even matriculated two of the musicians who later formed Blue Öyster Cult (whose music was famously used on John Carpenter’s Halloween [1978]). At the time, the student-run Culture Committee of CCT hosted a program called “Cinema as an Art”, which screened one or two films most Wednesday nights during the academic year in the theater of Snell Hall on Clarkson’s campus. Cinema as an Art brought interesting American and international films to Potsdam. Craven told author John Wooley, “There was an art house in the town that showed foreign films, and it was just at the beautiful fruition of the New Wave in Europe . . . So the first films I really saw that were grown up artistic films were the films of the New Wave—Buñuel, Fellini, Truffaut, all of those wonderfully inventive directors and writer-directors.”7 There is some evidence to suggest that Craven’s experience watching these motion pictures encouraged him to think about filmmaking as an artistic alternative to novel writing, though he did eventually publish a work of fiction in his later life (The Fountain Society in 1999).8 If this is the case, it would perhaps further explain his choice of a 16mm movie camera. Such a camera, though purchased used, would come with higher film and processing costs. But if part of Craven’s goal was to make low-to-no-budget projects worth screening to larger audiences (leading to The Last House on the Left), then a 16mm camera could provide that opportunity in a way that an 8mm home movie camera would not. It is intriguing to think about the likelihood that Wes Craven took full advantage of Potsdam’s cultural offerings. Craven grew up in Cleveland, Ohio before attending and graduating from Wheaton College in Illinois. From Wheaton (where his first wife, Bonnie Broecker, also went to college) the filmmaker entered the writing MA program at Johns Hopkins University under Elliot Coleman, working as the Professor’s aide during his period of study. Coleman,

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also a Wheaton graduate, founded The Writing Seminars at Hopkins in 1947, which over several decades ushered through such notables as John Barth, Russell Baker, Julia Randall, Joseph Whitehill, Richard Kim, and Josephine Jacobsen. Craven’s thesis was the novel, Noah’s Ark: The Journals of a Madman, which he hoped would launch his career as a serious American novelist.9 Upon completing this work, Coleman noted to his student how intensely visual his writing was and that he should think of writing screenplays.10 Craven graduated and married Bonnie before beginning his first teaching job at Westminster College in Pennsylvania between Erie and Pittsburgh.11 However, after that first and only year at Westminster, the young couple left Pennsylvania for Potsdam, New York and the somewhat higher pay at Clarkson College of Technology. Craven and his wife arrived in Potsdam with their one-year-old son Jonathan and found an apartment in the village’s downtown area not far from The Pendulum and The Roxy movie theatre, and only a few blocks from CCT’s main campus. At the time, Clarkson required its students to complete a sequence of humanities courses designed to give the school’s engineering and science majors a generalized college-level introduction to history, literature, and the arts. These are the courses that Wes taught for the two years he worked at Clarkson. Among his colleagues at CCT, Wes met Stu Fischoff, who was the adviser to the new drama club. Fischoff had long maintained an interest in both theater and film, and he did his best to spread this interest wherever he taught, including Clarkson. In the 1965–66 academic year, he helped to organize the first-ever drama club on the campus. That first year, they put on a reading of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? But in the fall of 1966, the club was robust enough in both student interest and enthusiasm to mount its first production on the boards. They also developed stage presentations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (with Craven directing, also a key influence on the 70s exploitation film world by inspiring The Devil in Miss Jones [Gerard Damiano, 1973]) and Edward Albee’s The Sandbox in the fall.12 An editorial in the first issue of the school newspaper for the following semester praised the club for its productions while also chastising it roundly for the cast and crew’s conduct during a wrap party.13 Among the students working alongside Craven at the time were John Heneage and Rob McConaghy, who were also integral to Pandora Experimentia, and had been helping with production design and stage lighting. Heneage was an electrical engineering major who made a name at Clarkson and around Potsdam more generally for being skilled at setting up stage lighting for musical and theatrical performances. John made friends with Ken Lyon after he responded to one of the drama club’s advertisements seeking new members in late winter or early spring of 1968. Ken also came to Clarkson as an electrical engineering major, but he would switch to mathematics. Later he discovered that his real passion was for poetry and literature, which helped direct his attention to the new drama club.

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By the spring semester of 1968, the club was continuing to find its identity, although its selection of material remained more cerebral than popular. The troupe planned to stage a production of Taliped Decanus (or “The Clubfooted Dean”), a parodic play situated in the center of John Barth’s 1966 meta-fictional novel Giles Goat-Boy, and they had progressed far enough to organize a preview of their effort late in the previous fall term.14 The novel is a satire of campus life, and the play-within-the-novel (shades perhaps of Craven’s later meta-movies such as Scream [1996]) is a parody of both Freud and Sophocles. However, it never came to fruition, and it occurred to Heneage or McConaghy or Fischoff that they might be able to make a film instead.15 The film they set out to make was full of bawdy fun and slapstick humor, echoing in some ways the more literary humor of Barth’s play. John and Ken Lyon teamed up and wrote the idea for Pandora Experimentia in a couple of days on Ken’s portable Smith-Corona typewriter.16 The document was much closer to a silent film scenario than a screenplay for the reason that the duo knew their film would not be able to utilize synchronized sound. The Revere C-103 was a fine 16mm home movie or documentary film camera, but its relatively loud wind-up motor made it ill-suited for using on location. Instead, they were forced to think visually, as filmmakers had been during the early period of cinema history before the advent of “talkies.” It is no surprise, then, that a prohibition on synchronized sound meant that the film probably would not follow the intellectual and philosophical path of the previous drama club productions. Left to their own devices, John and Ken wrote Pandora Experimentia and also a possible project called Sleeper, and chose to adapt a science-fiction horror story, “The Large Ants,” as their short film entitled Remorse.17 The duo showed their finished scenario for Pandora to Stu Fischoff, whose approval as the drama club adviser they needed if they wanted to be able to use his funds to produce the project. Fischoff would sign off and this approval released the $300 drama club budget, which adjusts to approximately $2,500 today. As early as March 27, 1968, The Integrator ran a short article about the film shoot already in progress. That article credits Ken, John, and Wes with co-writing the script, though Ken and John confirm that it was only the two of them who contributed to the scenario.18 The article also indicates that the club planned to make a second film in addition to Pandora. With a scenario in hand and Fischoff ’s approval as their faculty adviser, Lyon and Heneage were able to begin assembling their cast and crew. First and foremost, they were going to need a camera and a director of photography. Given that Craven had a movie camera, Fischoff asked him if he wanted to shoot the film with the two students co-directing.19 Photos from the Pandora shoot indicate that Craven’s camera had three lenses mounted, which would normally include a 1’ mid-range lens, a 0.75" wide-angle lens, and a 2" or longer telephoto lens, each with their own smaller viewfinder lens also mounted into the turret plate. The camera loaded 100’ daylight spools of 16mm film, each of

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Figure 1.2  Wes Craven (far left) embarks on his first film shoot, picture courtesy Ken Lyon

which was good for between two and a half to four minutes of film, depending on the selected frame rate. Since Pandora was not a synchronized sound film, there was no particular reason to shoot at 24 frames per second (fps), so Craven likely shot at 18fps as an economizing measure. Even so, at over $11 per 100’ spool in 1968, the film stock and processing alone would have cost between $150 and $200 or more, depending on the outtake ratio. Given that Ken and John recall spending anywhere between $300 and $400 on film and processing, there was likely a higher outtake ratio in which only about half the shot and processed film was used in the final cut.20 It is also worth noting that the club produced two additional short films, Sleeper and Remorse, which would also be included in their recollection of the film and processing costs.21 When asked about the processed film that they cut together, Ken Lyon did not remember any of it being muddy, out of focus, or badly exposed. Principal photography took place over several weeks in March and April of 1968. The following is a description of sequences from Pandora Experimentia gleaned from the recollections of the students who produced it. They admit that their memories may not be fully accurate and that the scenes are not necessarily presented in the order they appear in the film; however, in gathering together their memories of the production, they did have the advantage of corroborating or challenging each other’s contributions. Short of locating and reviewing the film itself, this is the most accurate description of the content ever published.

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Still, every effort has been made to note when a fact or detail is especially fuzzy. Pandora is not so much a narrative film as a sequential one. Most sequences revolve around someone looking for something (no doubt accounting in some measure for Craven recalling the title as The Searchers), in some cases the kind of mysterious box implied by the title, and often the sequence’s action resolves itself humorously or absurdly. Accordingly, the scenario is given as a list rather than a traditional synopsis.

•• Pandora Experimentia begins with a credit sequence painted onto several

••

•• ••

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•• ••

•• ••

large sheets of paper. These sheets were then filmed one-by-one while each sheet was set on fire, using the burning away of each sheet as a natural visual transition between the credits. One of the sheets did not burn adequately, so a crew member threw gasoline on it. A large gathering of men in suits and wearing white armbands arrives at a farm in several cars. The men gather inside the farm’s grain silo to receive their instructions. These were all of the men who would be searching for the eponymous box throughout the film. This scene and the opening credits prior to it were screened with the theme music to Mission: Impossible to emphasize suspense.22 There is a sequence involving cadet corps marching across a field.23 The Pool Hall scene focuses on a student smoking a cigar while playing pool in the Vernon (a popular student bar in downtown Potsdam). This scene was set to Dave Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance”, lending it a particular atmosphere of contemporary cool. A bank robber in a red and white horizontal striped rugby shirt, domino mask, and a cabbie cap holds up the Marine Midlands Bank on Elm Street in Potsdam (perhaps inspiring the rumor that this short was Craven’s early groundwork for his later iconic franchise).24 The bank gamely provided the student filmmakers with 100 $1 bills that could be thrown in the air when the robber’s plans went awry. The robber from the previous sequence is marched into the Potsdam Village Jail. When the door to the cell is opened, a gaggle of bikini-clad women come bursting out. In a sequence that uses some creative editing, a male student is waiting to cross Market Street in downtown Potsdam, but the light indicates, “Don’t Walk.” When the light finally says “Walk,” he steps into the street and is run down by a train. The bathtub sequence involves a female student lounging in a bubble bath. Several men in suits and ties enter the scene and search the bathtub while the woman is still in it.25 The radio tower sequence involves Ken Lyon climbing halfway up a 400-foot radio tower. Ken plays a man climbing the tower to get a look into

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the distance (searching, always searching), while being pursued by others. The sequence features what appears to be the falling death of Ken’s character, which was achieved by having him haul a straw-stuffed dummy up the ladder with him and throwing it off when he got a signal from the ground. This scene was intercut with the next one, suggesting that the appearance of the woman waving from the window causes the fall. A woman (played by Joyce Simpson), in a bathrobe, waves to the camera out of her second-story apartment window before turning her back to the window and walking out of view. The scenario called for Joyce to remove her bathrobe after turning away from the window, but she refused to do so. The Mystery Box scene features a large colorful box situated in the middle of a field. The crew had repurposed the box from a theater set. It was collapsible, and when the box falls apart, a group of women hidden inside come running out of it. In the college laundry, workers are picking through a large pile of dirty washing when suddenly a young woman in a skirt and bra bursts from the pile and runs off. There was a hospital scene in which Ken portrays a doctor (in gown and mask) performing body transplants. The hospital generously supplied the use of a gurney for the scene. One sequence was filmed at the local downtown grocery store (Donah’s “Big M”), which features students pushing shopping carts up and down the aisles, jamming the carts into one another, and upsetting merchandise including broken bags of flour. This scene featured some mobile camerawork involving Craven being pushed around inside a shopping cart while he filmed. Another scene inverts the popular “How Many Students Can You Fit into a VW Beetle” challenge by using a simple framing set up to depict a hoard of students emerging from a single car. Pandora Experimentia ends with shots of a student clambering over some rocks and finally discovering “the box” hinted at in the title. The film runs out with a countdown leader, cutting to black.

This list of scenes gives a relatively detailed picture of what Pandora Experimentia may have been like both to shoot and to watch. Since there was no synchronized sound for the film, the scenario that Lyon and Heneage wrote relied heavily on simple visuals and comedy. As a number of alumni who recall seeing the film in the spring of 1968 reported, the greatest impressions it left were of scatological humor and irreverence. Since the scenario was not an intricate and coherent dramatic narrative with dialogue, very little rehearsal was necessary for the shoot. John and Ken would let the given actors in a scene know what they needed to do, and Wes would set

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up the camera (usually on a tripod and using a shutter release cable to reduce shake). Reportedly Craven was always on the look-out for interesting angles. And yet, things did not always go as planned. In the scene where a student waits for the walk signal to cross a busy street, only to be mowed down by a passing freight train, Ken had told the actor to look for his hand signal so as to begin walking at the right time. However, a passing group of friends prompted Ken to wave at the wrong moment, sending the actor out into the dangerously busy road at the wrong moment. These sorts of mishaps sometimes led to opportunities, too. In the scene that called for Ken and others to climb the radio tower, someone must have seen the students climbing the mast and called the police. As the car approached at speed, its lights and sirens blaring, Wes shouted for Ken to complete the shot quickly by throwing the stuffed dummy from the tower before the police arrived. Of course, this meant that the police became worried that someone had actually fallen from the tower. The officers were not impressed by the scene they found and hauled everyone present down to the village jail to charge them with trespassing. Eventually, they were convinced that the whole thing was for a student film, and they let the group off with a warning not to engage in any more dangerous antics. But Ken saw the jail experience as a valuable opportunity for the film and convinced the police to let them lens a scene in the cells. Craven would take this renegade shoot-bythe-skin-of-the-teeth approach into The Last House on the Left. With their film “in the can” John and Ken and members of the cast and crew embarked on post-production, which consisted of two main phases. First, they needed to edit the processed film into a final cut. Clarkson did not have film editing equipment, but St. Lawrence University, a few miles down the road, did. John was able to arrange the use of their editing suite after hours, when the students and faculty would not be needing it. John and Ken pulled an all-nighter with their film and a box of doughnuts, surrounded by strips of 16mm film stock hanging from wires strung across the room, with Ken choosing and cutting the shots and John splicing them together.26 As is often the case, the editing room was the site of some serendipitous art. When the pool hall scene with a student, called Bob Ballon, smoking a cigar was cut into the film, John spliced it in backwards and upside down. At first they were angry at their mistake, but they also thought it was funny, so they kept it that way rather than correct the edit.27 By dawn, they had a forty-five-minute film, but they were not quite finished. The film still needed a soundtrack, even if it was not technically a synchronized one. To tackle the soundtrack challenge, John and Ken turned to Rob McConaghy. McConaghy was a mechanical engineering major at Clarkson, who relished the chance to solve the technical challenge of recording a quasi-synchronized soundtrack. In the end, McConaghy chose to run the tape recorder through a Variac transformer to allow minor adjustments to the playback speed during

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screenings.28 Creating the soundtrack itself was much more straightforward. John, Ken, and Rob met at a farmhouse outside of a nearby village. They had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a collection of about thirty records, and a mattress on the floor so that they could take turns sleeping while at least two of them handled the recording. Many of the songs they used are lost to time, but the trio all agree that they used Lalo Schifrin’s main theme from the TV series Mission: Impossible, Ennio Morricone’s main theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966), and Dave Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance.” With the soundtrack now concluded, the film was complete, and the production team was ready to screen their work. They then began the marketing phase of their project, and the team proved just as creative with this aspect as they had been with the film itself. John wrote and Ken edited a full-page article/advertisement, “The Potsdam Underground Surfaces with Pandora Experimentia,” which ran in Clarkson’s newspaper The Integrator on May 8, 1968, framed by over a dozen behind-the-scenes photos. The ad is full of hyperbole, billing the film as “the ultimate movie experience . . . able to conquer the wide screen in naked color, Ultra-Vision, and Vision-Vision.” These carny-type claims, with hints to salacity (“naked color”) were perhaps echoed by the infamous copy on the newspaper ads for Craven’s first wide-release film just a few years later, The Last House on the Left, which insist, “Warning! Not recommended for persons over 30! . . . To avoid fainting keep repeating, It’s only a movie . . . only a movie . . . only a movie . . . Can a movie go too far?”29 The Pandora ad quotes a fictitious “underground film guru” named Otto Muttner, a sort of impresario/producer character, praising John and Ken and Wes for their work, “Not once did my directors use any common knowledge or sense of decency, therefore I will be using them for all my films in the near future.” There is reference to the crew being arrested, and the large number of students and locals included in the film, both knowingly and unknowingly. In fact, this became one of the main thrusts of the advertisement: come see the film, because you just might be in it . . . The debut weekend screenings were standing-room-only affairs in the auditorium of Damon Hall on Clarkson’s downtown campus. There were three showings per night at 7:00pm, 8:00pm, and 9:00pm.30 Continuing the legacy of exploitation carny (think Mom and Dad [William Beaudine, 1945]), one member of the cast even dressed up as “Otto Muttner” and mingled with the audience in character. Stu Fischoff, as the faculty adviser to the drama club, acted as the announcer/narrator for the evening. John and Rob set up the projector, and then Rob also handled the sound with the tape recorder and the Variac to keep it more or less synched. Since the only copy of the film they had was the reel they had spliced together at St. Lawrence University, it was almost inevitable that the film would break at some point. When it did during one screening, they simply let it unspool onto the floor of the projection booth.

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After the screenings were over, the cast and crew used the proceeds to throw a beer bash cast party at Bill Sherman’s farm a few miles outside of the village, where they had already filmed inside the grain silo and the rocky fields. Sherman is featured in one of the behind-the-scenes photos on the full-page ad in The Integrator. According to myth, once Pandora opens the box, all of the evils contained within it are released into the world except for hope. Hope is all that remains within the box. On the one hand, there is an interpretation of this ending that focuses on the fact that hope is listed among the other evils of the world. In this view, gifting humanity with hope is a kind of cruelty that either prolongs the tragedies of life or at least distracts people from the reality of the ubiquity of suffering. But then there is the more positive (mis)interpretation in which our wishes, aspirations, and ambitions are sometimes all we have to hold onto, and that motivation can sometime prove enough to carry us when other support is absent. The people who made Pandora Experimentia were mostly very young. There were college students, although Wes Craven and Stu Fischoff were by then in their late twenties when they helped make the film. And they made Pandora at a time of social, political, and artistic turmoil . . . and possibility. Potsdam, New York did (and still does) have a music scene largely by virtue of the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, but the small North Country village never had an underground film scene. For a brief season in 1968, the men and women making Pandora Experimentia were that film scene. They perhaps unleashed something by making that film, something that would continue to echo throughout the rest of their lives. Wes Craven’s future following this premiere is well-documented. His interviews with Wooley seem to indicate that it was his experience going to the cinema to view art screenings, held on Wednesday nights at Clarkson, that inspired him to imagine himself as a filmmaker. Perhaps Wes Craven viewed Pandora as a kind of boot camp. The college was providing money for film development, the students wrote the scenario, gathered all of the actors, and did the editing and soundtrack. With the details we do have of the project, such as the “attraction” of women in bikinis, it is also clear that the makers were aware of the concurrent exploitation film market, which Craven would soon enter and, arguably, would use to define his style and themes. Craven put in the time and effort and in return got a crash course in underground filmmaking. It does seem clear that his experience shooting Pandora accounts for a change in his thinking about his artistic future. When his department chair at CCT told him that he needed to spend less time running around making movies with undergraduates and more time pursuing a doctorate if he wanted to advance in the academic world, Craven took that advice to heart and quit his staff role.31 Craven traveled to New York City and attempted to get a job in the film industry. His initial attempts were unsuccessful, and he was forced to return upstate

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and teach high school for a year not far from Potsdam. However, he was more successful the following year due to a connection with Steve Chapin, a friend and former student of Craven’s at Clarkson. Craven taught during the student’s junior and senior years, and Steve recounts to author Jason Zinoman how he and Craven used to hang out together and smoke a lot of pot.32 Steve Chapin is brother to Harry and Tom Chapin of the famous musical Chapin family. At the time, Harry Chapin was also involved in documentary production through his studios in New York, and Steve helped put in a good word for his friend and former professor. Harry was able to show Craven how to perform some rudimentary audio editing, and that helped him to secure some of his initial jobs in film production from 1969–71. As mentioned, Craven himself indicated during interviews for the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat that several of his earliest jobs in filmmaking were part of the “other Hollywood” of the adult film industry.33 Ken Lyon’s recollections of several meetings with Craven in New York City in the 1970–71 timeframe corroborate that account. It is from these beginnings that Craven was able to work with Peter Locke on You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It Or You’ll Lose That Beat (1971) as one of that film’s editors, which attracted the attention of Sean Cunningham, later of Friday the 13th (1980) fame. Sometime during this period, possibly when Cunningham and Craven were attempting to convince their financial backers that Craven could direct as well as edit, Craven borrowed the only existing copy of Pandora Experimentia from John Heneage. Despite decades of attempting to get in touch with Craven about the film, neither Lyon nor Heneage have seen the film since then. Lyon tried to locate the film after Craven’s death in 2015, but Craven’s estate explained that it was not among the late director’s possessions. Pandora Experimentia also had an impact on many others who were involved in its production, even if they did not all wind up in Hollywood. The other person who did eventually make his way to Tinseltown was Stu Fischoff. According to Fischoff, Clarkson fired him not long after for his anti-Vietnam War activities on and off campus.34 This was not at all deleterious to his career, however. Fischoff went on to become a driving force in the field of media psychology with a long career as a faculty member at California State University, Los Angeles as well as becoming the senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology. In addition to this highly successful academic career, Fischoff became a screenwriter as well as a psychological consultant to film and television productions. He died in 2014. Ken Lyon finished his math degree at Clarkson, and with Craven’s help he found a place in the same Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars where Craven got his MA. Lyon threw himself into poetry while in Baltimore and then went on to become an English teacher in Vermont, Colorado, and Washington, getting his doctorate in fiction writing along the way, and finishing his career in public school administration. Lyon still writes poetry and is

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about to start work on a novel. John Heneage finished his degree as well, and went on to a long and successful career as a nuclear engineer. What Lyon and Heneage, and other friends like Rob McConaghy, took away from their experience making Pandora was that it was possible to have a big idea, something that seemed unlikely or even impossible, and gather together a group of interested people willing to see if they could make it work. Heneage in particular sees this as emblematic of the late 1960s.35 The world was tumultuous, and people all over the world were reacting to the full gamut of evils they saw. And yet there was still hope that people could come together to make something creative and worthwhile. Despite the fact that filmmaking was not seen as something easily available to anyone who was interested in it (certainly not in the way it is now to anyone with a smartphone in their pocket), a couple of undergraduates in a remote northern New York village were able to gather a minimum of resources and a maximum of willing volunteers to make their vision into a reality. No one expected to make any money from the result or to gain any kind of real fame. Nonetheless, the experience and the accomplishment itself had a profound impact on a number of people involved. The experience of that shoot inspired Wes Craven’s artistic imagination and ambition in ways that only a couple years before would have been completely unthinkable (after all, Craven was crushed by his thesis adviser’s comment that his novel read like a screenplay). Furthermore, Craven’s influence as a professor and mentor to students like Ken Lyon may be just as important. Certainly, Craven reached more people with his films than he did as a professor of literature, but he left behind a legacy in both careers that continues to influence others to this day. We may never actually get to see Pandora Experimentia again. Craven may have destroyed it at some point after 1970, or it may have been thrown away inadvertently. But maybe it is still out there somewhere, waiting to be found by someone who will recognize it for what it is—the first project of an important American filmmaker. notes   1. Thommy Hutson, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy—The Making of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (New York: Permuted Press, 2016), 24.   2. John Wooley, Wes Craven: The Man and his Nightmares (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 33.   3. Joe Bushey, “10 Things You [Probably] Didn’t Know About Clarkson,” Clarkson University, June 6, 2018, https://diy.clarkson.edu/undergrad/10-things-you-didnt-knowabout-clarkson/. It should also perhaps be mentioned that with its theme of an older generation responsible for the horrors that now haunt a younger one, the “Elm Street” in the title of Craven’s iconic film could relate to that on which John F. Kennedy was assassinated (also giving us the title A Nightmare on Elm Street).

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  4. Jason Zinoman, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders gave us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).   5. STEM is an acronym for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”   6. See Wheeler W. Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of the 1960s Experimental Cinema (Albany: State University of Albany Press, 1997). Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider (eds), Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).   7. Wooley, Wes Craven, 32.   8. Wooley, Wes Craven, 32–3.   9. The novel is narrated by Noah Songsti, the son of a parson. The Songsti family lives in a stone cottage in a cemetery overshadowed by an enormous bridge that arcs towards “the city.” Noah is essentially the madman in the attic of this cottage, and the novel evinces an intense Gothic atmosphere, which Kendall R. Phillips suggests is the driving aesthetic in Wes Craven’s film career. Though there is nothing overtly supernatural in the novel, the narrator perceives monsters and nightmares and seemingly marvelous events. Kendall R. Phillips, “The Gothic Dimensions in the Films of Wes Craven,” Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 73–4. 10. Zinoman, Shock Value, 68–9. 11. Westminster later, in 1985, graduated Greg Nicotero, who went on to become one of the most well-known and influential horror makeup artists of the past forty years, including work on A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (only in the latter film did he work with Craven). 12. “Drama Club Soon on Stage; Extensive Work Has Been Done,” The Integrator (Potsdam, NY), December 6, 1966, 1, 7. 13. “The Drama Club,” Editorial Section, The Integrator (Potsdam, NY), January 10, 1967, 2. 14. “Notices,” The Integrator (Potsdam, NY), November 15, 1967, 4. 15. Though no one remembers precisely who had the idea first, the only candidates given what they do recall are Heneage, McConaghy, and Stu Fischoff. 16. Ken Lyon, email message to author, September 22, 2015. 17. Ken was not directly involved in Remorse; it was more John and Rob’s project. 18. “Drama Club Producing Films,” The Integrator (Potsdam, NY), March 27, 1968, 4. 19. Ken Lyon, email message to author, November 18, 2021. 20. Ken Lyon, email message to author, September 22, 2015. 21. Remorse, adapted from Howard Fast’s 1960 science-fiction short story “The Large Ant,” was one of two short films that members of the crew made around the same time. The other was a thirty-second short titled Sleeper, which was also referred to in at least the September 1968 Integrator screening advertisement as Kicks, for which Craven again acted as cameraman. Remorse, in particular, is interesting, because it is a sort of sciencefiction-horror story in which a man kills a 14-inch long ant out of an instinctive fear of the unknown, later regretting his hasty decision and what it says about human nature. It was precisely the kind of fear film that would continue to fascinate both Wes Craven and Stu Fischoff as their careers unfolded over the following decades, though Heneage recalls that Craven only lent his camera for the film and was not himself involved in its production. John Heneage, email to author, September 24, 2021. 22. Ken Lyon, email message to author, November 18, 2021. 23. The film was produced at the height of US involvement in the war in Vietnam, as well as the height of war protests, which had reached Potsdam as well. The inclusion of marching soldiers in the film was almost certainly meant ironically/satirically.

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24. It would be nice if the shirt had been a red and green-striped sweater and the hat a fedora, a la Freddy Krueger, but alas no. 25. This is perhaps Craven’s primal bathtub scene, of which we would see the descendants in The Last House on the Left (1972), Deadly Blessing (1981), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). He was clearly drawn to this invasion of privacy and its evocation of vulnerability. 26. Ken Lyon, email messages to author, September 22, 2015 and November 18, 2021. 27. Ken Lyon, email message to author, November 18, 2021. 28. Ken Lyon, email message to author, September 22, 2015. 29. Hutson, 27. 30. “The Potsdam Underground Surfaces with Pandora Experimentia,” The Integrator (Potsdam, NY), May 8, 1968, 5. 31. Hutson, Never Sleep Again,24. 32. Zinoman, Shock Value, 69. 33. Inside Deep Throat, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (2005; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2005), DVD. 34. This may have been the academic version of firing, which consists of a faculty member not being hired back for the next academic year on one pretext or another. Regardless of the details, Fischoff ’s impression was that he was let go because of his political activities and speech. Jonathan Koenig, “Dr. Stuart Fischoff,” Careers in Psychology, Jun. 19, 2021, https://careersinpsychology.org/interview/dr-stuart-fischoff/. 35. John Heneage, email to author, September 13, 2015.

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2

Censorship in Liberal Times? The Legacy of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left in Germany Holger Briel

I

t might be argued that, for much of his lifetime as a director, Wes Craven’s horror film work faced a crisis of legitimacy among critics, perhaps highlighted by the fact that some of his best-known projects were banned and censored in various countries.1 In Germany, this “crisis of legitimacy” was especially evident when it came to Craven’s first feature-length film, The Last House on the Left (hereafter: LHOTL, 1972). In the late 1960s and 1970s (West) Germany had been quick to follow trends from countries on the liberal forefront of the portrayal of sexual content in films, especially Denmark and Sweden. In the absence of legal pornography, the country even began producing its own brand of sexually charged films, either billed as lurid sex education or soft-core comedy films, modelled on Russ Meyer’s work. However, similar laissez-faire treatment was not extended to filmic displays of graphic violence reaching German shores (indeed, the country only became known for provocative horror films at the tail-end of the 1980s, with Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik [1987]).Craven’s LHOTL can be seen among the canonical independent American horror films of the 1970s. Others almost certainly include The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974); Snuff (Michael and Roberta Findlay, 1976); The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977); Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978). Invariably, these benchmark genre films had problems with various censorship boards.2 In the following chapter, I will approach the subject of LHOTL and German censorship by first providing a quick overview of the country’s certification practices in spirit and in letter, and especially as regards the modern horror film. Then, I will look at LHOTL’s initial (non)release in Germany. It will emerge from this discussion that, far from following a liberal doctrine on artistic freedom, for many years German censors followed restrictive practices already established in the infancy

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Figure 2.1  Surprisingly it was the representation of the police (played by Martin Kove and Marshall Anker) that also caused censorship problems in Germany

of film around 1900 and then fully emerging during the Nazi era. Furthermore, the place of Wes Craven’s LHOTL in the history of horror will be discussed with an eye on US society at the time of its release. In conclusion, I will claim that there are a number of subjects, such as representations of rebellion against authority, that are more harshly censored in Germany than elsewhere, a fact that could also explain the censorial practices regarding LHOTL and even its wider international impact and importance across Western democracies (the film was famously banned as a “video nasty” in the UK). Craven’s LHOTL (in Germany variably known as Das letzte Haus links, Mondo Brutale, or Das Haus der teuflischen Bestien) was immediately banned in Germany and would have to wait until 2019 to be taken off the German Film Index by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (BPjM, the Federal Authority for Media Harmful to Young Persons, the German Censorship Board), and until 2020 to have its uncut version released, a full forty-eight years after its American theatrical debut. Even Craven’s later films, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), were still judged based on his early work and continued to be viewed with suspicion. A Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, would be called “gestörter film” (“depraved film”) by some.3 The website www.schnittberichte.com, comprehensively chronicling film censorship in Germany, contains over twenty-four pages of reports on his films in Germany alone. Other international English language websites on censorship in film, such as http://movie-censorship.com, have an equally large amount of material accrued regarding the censorship of Craven’s films in international markets.

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german film censorship and lhotl

After the end of the war in 1945, film and TV censorship partially resided within the remit of the German Länder, and differing federal practices were established between (West)Berlin and Munich, with the former typically being more liberal than its Bavarian counterpart. With VHS tapes becoming the main battleground for censorship in the late 1970s and early 1980s, focus also shifted to countrywide legislation, a legal practice that has continued into the digital age with Blu-ray, DVD, and today’s streaming services. As is the case with other Western countries such as the USA or the UK, another shift occurred with the introduction of the ratings system in the late 1960s and early in the 1970s, and discussions on censorship moved away from ideological issues and towards health and developmental concerns for children and teenagers who might see adult-orientated material.4As of 2019, LHOTL is not indexed in Germany anymore.5 The BzKJ (Bundeszentrale für Kinder- und Jugendmedienschutz—or the German Federal Authority for Children and Youth Media Safety) has the case of LHOTL filed under its alternate title used in Germany, Mondo Brutale, which was used in the indexing process of the country’s first VHS cassette release in 1983. The original decision to index LHOTL was taken by the German Censorship Board on July 21, 1983. As is typical for the written justification, the applicant (typically a municipal or regional youth authority) is redacted in the official announcement and the justification summarises its position. At times, it remains unclear who is speaking, the board or the applicant. In any case, the document states the applicant admits that while violence is used, it is not always as visible as in other such “Machwerke” (“sorry efforts,” a derogatory term), but that it still contains many “cynical allusions.” Furthermore, “[D]ie im Film dargestellte Gewalt [sei] in jeder Hinsicht motivlos [. . .] und [entbehre] jeder nur möglichen Rechtfertigungsmöglichkeit. Der einzige Gegenstand sei das Verbrechen um des Verbrechens willen.” Translated this means “from every viewpoint, the violence portrayed in the film is without motive and lacks any possible justification. The only object of the film is violence for violence’s sake.”6 Lastly, the film is proposed to disorient children and teenagers—socio-ethically with its “Scheusslichkeiten” (“horridness” and “atrocities” —in German, this word is typically used by parents speaking down to their children and is rather imprecise). Then the reasons for the indexing of the film are given. Here again, the wording is rather peculiar but does evidence involuntary humorous passages such as this one: Mary’s Mutter gibt vor, von ihrem Mann unbefriedigt zu sein und nähert sich Wiesel. Als er mit gefessleten Händen vor ihr steht, beisst sie ihm den Penis ab. Diese Szene ist recht gut erkennbar, so dass man sich insoweit auch nicht darauf berufen kann, Gewalt würde nur andeutungsweise in dem Film gezeigt. Wiesel schreit.7

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Mary’s mother pretends to be sexually dissatisfied with her husband and approaches Weasel. When he stands in front of her, hands tied, she bites off his penis. This scene is easily visible, so that based on this scene one cannot claim that violence is only hinted at. Weasel screams. The text goes on to state that in the eyes of the Board there is no plot beyond violence and that there is no (saving) relativisation of the “verrohende” (brutalising, vulgarising) plot to be found. The police are portrayed as especially “vertrottelt” (inept, idiotic), presumably a wider concern regarding societal institutions. Lastly, as a summary: “Ein Film, der [. . .] nur aus Gewaltätigkeiten besteht und dabei allein auf das lüsternde Interesse des Zuschauers und Gewalt abzielt und gleichzeitig Selbstjustiz rechtfertigt, is offenbar jugendgefährdend.” This translates as “A film which only consists of acts of violence and thereby solely aims for the lustful interest of the viewer and . . . at the same time justifies vigilantism [which is] obviously a detriment to youths.”8 This justification for a ban of the film is interesting in several ways. Firstly, because this report does dwell on the violence but admits that such acts are often only hinted at. Hence, it is not really the portrayal of excessive violence that rankles the board, but rather that it is supposedly gratuitous and remorseless as well as in opposition to respected pillars of society such as the police. This, however, is clearly not the case for anyone who has studied Craven’s impressive debut. Writes Barone: As tough to watch and violently disturbing today as it was back in 1972, The Last House on the Left distinguished itself from the rest of its classifiable genre by being distinctly Craven’s vision. The horror derives from everyday people, not ghosts or goblins; when the four-pack of depraved sadists at its center rape, humiliate and ultimately murder two teenage girls in an isolated forest, they eventually show remorse and look at their vile handiwork with a discomforting blend of fascination and disgust.9 Additionally, the Board also does not focus on the rapes portrayed as objectionable; what it does cite as the reasons for the indexing include: 1) the already mentioned lack of justification for the violence shown; 2) the mention of the character Junior’s suicide as a way to avoid taking responsibility for his actions; and 3) the portrayal of the police as inept stand-ins for the state. It would therefore seem that it was neither the nudity nor the rape scenes nor even the violence that prompted the Board to index the film, but rather the fact that it could not discern any artistic justification for the narrative decisions that

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Craven takes. And indeed, in at least one of the cut versions disseminated in Germany, scenes where the police give a particularly stunning display of their ineptness are cut entirely. It is therefore fair to say that at least some of these German censorial practices harken back to the very reason why, in 1906, film censorship had been introduced in the first place: to prohibit the disparaging of the law.10 Furthermore, with its decision to only allow a censored version of the film, cut by eleven minutes, the internal revenge logic of the film is destroyed. The final version originally released under the German FSK 16-rating omits most of the initial acts of violence against the two girls, thereby foregoing the grounding for the justification of the vengeance visited upon Krug and company in the end. With its decision, the board created a self-fulfilling prophecy, censoring a film in such a way that it would only portray apparently gratuitous violence and thereby preclude any possible catharsis that rape-revenge films might offer the audience, inclusive of empathetic feelings for the victims viewers might develop.11 It is precisely the moral ambiguity and its inability/ unwillingness to justify social violence (anymore) that perhaps makes LHOTL such a valuable contribution to the horror genre of the time (as also mentioned by Becker [2006]).12Overall, the history of LHOTL censorship in Germany is a long one and would stretch for almost fifty years. A cut version of LHOTL began screening on October 19, 1973 in Germany, variously under its English title, its German translation or the titles Mondo Brutale (Brutal World) or Das Haus der teuflischen Bestien (The House of the Devilish Beasts). The film was consequently confiscated and indexed in 1982, despite the fact that an already censored version had been presented in cinemas a decade earlier. In 2005 its DVD was also confiscated. Partly prompted by a “Not guilty” verdict for “glorification of violence” in a court case in the staunchly Catholic city of Fulda in October 2017, the confiscation order was rescinded, and the film was moved from Index List B (no sales, no advertising) to Index List A (sale allowed, but no advertising).13 On September 5, 2019, the DVD version, which had already been legally available in Austria since 2012, was taken off the Index list altogether and, finally, in July 2020, the FSK assigned an adults-18 rating to the uncut version for the first time. By this stage, however, the legendary director had already passed away. w h at t h e c e n s o r s m i s s e d

An immediate giveaway for the censors should have been that LHOTL is very much influenced by, if not indeed a remake of, Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring. In an intriguing essay by Köhne and Renz,14 the authors also compare LHOTL to Bergman’s film. They remind their readers that Bergman’s film itself is based on a thirteenth-century Swedish Ballad called

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“Töres döttrar i Vänge” (“Töre’s Daughters in Venge”), which thematizes the conflict between Norse mythology and its heathen gods and Christianity. The revenge the father visits upon the rapists and murders of his daughter have been interpreted as the return of heathenism, but Köhne and Renz show that the implication of Bergman’s film at least goes beyond religion and implicates the modern family structure with its “familiäre Begehrenskonstellation” (familial constellation of desire) for much of its violence. In both Bergman’s film and Craven’s, old rituals of civilization do not work anymore. Thus, for instance, the attempt at cleansing through washing is present in each, with Krug and his gang in the lake echoing a similar scene with the father from Bergman’s classic. Brashinsky finds a number of further correlations between the two films. He writes that: The Last House is as full of hidden (and not so hidden), playful (and straight-faced) allusions to its prototype as its landscape is full of springs. Just like the coquettish blonde Karin, who insisted on the white Sunday dress that was a bit too immodest for a medieval Swedish maid, the coquettish blonde Mary Collingwood argues with her parents about clothing.”15 He also finds strong similarities in the treatment of frogs where fairytale stories become deconstructed, and, even more formidably, in the location of the suburb in the film, which represents an important part of its own mythologizing and the location for many a slasher film to come: What in 1959 was the fourteenth century, becomes 1972 in 1972. And what in fourteenth century Sweden was primeval forest, the realm of basic elements and instincts, in 1972 becomes an American suburb. Suburbia, the citadel of normality in American culture, is where the myth of family values found refuge from society’s nervous breakdown. An isolationist haven [. . .] the suburb is a mutation of urban and rural mythologies. Neither city nor country, it appropriates (in the collective subconscious of its inhabitants) the best and the safest of both. Never a paradise, but always a target, the suburb is a perfect setting for the bizarre, more so against the backdrop of nauseating and often fake familial serenity. It is also one of the first reactions to the defeat of the 1960s, coming from inside the generation that lost.16 This suburban in-between place, in the 1960s and 70s becoming more and more a refuge for the urban middle classes, was thus rendered dangerous and

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Figure 2.2  David Hess as Krug proved a controversial screen figure

its inhabitants who, having moved there to escape the racial and capitalist cutthroat city, were rendered helpless, with their intended segregation backfiring.17 Such a factor might also go a long way to explain the use of violence in Craven’s film. One of the problems the German censors encountered was that most of the time-honored justification tropes for the portrayal of violence did not apply with Craven’s work. Neither catharsis, nor inhibition, habitualization, suggestion, rationalization, or pedagogical theories could be cited in order to justify the portrayal of the rape and murder scenes, at the hands of Krug (David Hess) and his trio of murderers and thugs. Traditionally, only if at least one or, better yet, several of these tropes could be applied, would a film be (seemingly) deemed acceptable. What the censorship board did not realize, though, was that it is exactly the absence of any of these possible justification methods that the film thematizes, and which would in turn become a trope informing later horror productions themselves. This is the seminal break with the horror film paradigm of the time that Craven initiated in 1972. Of course, before idolizing the film, one also has to remember that many of its parts were perhaps not intended for intellectual fortification; rather, they were probably produced to shock and to exploit contemporary events such as the Manson killings (hinted at with Mari’s “peace” necklace, which becomes perverted in the hands of the Krug gang). Also, some of the techniques that are used in shooting the film might be of more prosaic origins than critical approaches might lead us believe. Thus, the rapid cuts and the use of handheld camera, which aid in making the film feel so jarring, immediate, and authentic, were not necessarily due to any intellectual aspirations. As Craven admitted, the hand-held camera device was used because they simply did not have a dolly system on the set.18 But no matter why this filmic device was used,

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it would, over the ensuing years, become a staple of horror films all the way through to the phenomenal success of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), another woodland-set text. LHOTL was shot under the title Night of Vengeance and had also originally been intended to be shot as a pornographic hard-core film. A few days into the shooting, Craven and his producer, Sean Cunningham (in whose parents’ Connecticut house much of the film was shot and whose wife Susan would create the costumes), decided to make it a horror film instead, toning down the sexual elements.19 Upon its release critics were generally dismissive of the film—with the famous exception of Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times—and sometimes outright nasty in their reviews.20As established, the German censors singled out the unjustified violence of LHOTL as the main reason to index and ban the film. From a genre standpoint, there had been precedents already, especially with Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films, where, for the first time, the camera would not cut away from, say, the slicing of a human neck or the removal of a woman’s tongue (in Blood Feast [1963]). Craven would also avail himself of this “good taste” tradition and do the same in LHOTL: the graphic disembowelment of one of the two teenage girls in the film undoubtedly shares a lineage to that of Lewis. Some of the torture and murder tools also had predecessors to such gruesome schlock and were thus far from being included in a mere spurious move. A good example here is the use of a chainsaw at the climax. This weapon had originally appeared in The Mad Magician (John Brahm, 1954) and in Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore (1970). But in LHOTL, unlike in the earlier films, such moments are not just a tool to up the ante on previous gory set pieces; rather, there is a clear psychological reason for the existence of violence in Craven’s film. The chainsaw signifies Father Collingwood’s workman-like revenge of his daughter’s rape and murder; for instance, inferring a similar dogmatic focus on brutal murder that his wealth and suburban comfort might distract from. Robin Wood goes even further and relates the complexity of the film with the multiple and contrary positions—victim, violator, and “righteous” avenger—and their interconnections it assigns to its audience: [T]he audience cannot escape the implications. We are spared nothing in the protracted tormenting of the two girls—our having to share the length of their ordeal is part of the point—and we cannot possibly enjoy it. They are us. Yet we also cannot disengage ourselves from their tormentors: They are us, too. [. . .] No act of violence in the film is condoned, yet we are led to understand every act as the realization of potentials that exist within us all, that are intrinsic to our social and personal relationships.21 Thus, the film works precisely because it is violent and because the effects and trauma of violence, and the potential for such horror within the wealthy nuclear family, are its central theme. LHOTL emerged three years after the

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Manson Family massacre and thematizes the decay of the by now hollowsounding promise of the American Dream during the tail-end of Vietnam and in the wake of Kent State and My Lai. Furthermore, while the film is violent, it is nevertheless also true that “Craven never glorifies the violence. Not a single frame is set in slow motion or over-styled for the sake of highlighting garish and complex special effects. Once the killers realize they’ve gone too far, the audience clearly sees the remorse on their faces.”22 This approach remains unique even for horror films made today.Another factor that perhaps remained underappreciated is the way the violence is intercut with humorous elements (i.e., the often but unfairly criticized bumbling policemen—the comedy interludes arguably reminding us of how “out of place” such escapism was on television in 1972, before or after the nightly news would beam harrowing images of America’s doomed but prolonged mission in Vietnam), but also with unexpected visually stunning scenery (harking back to the “Spring” of Bergman, perhaps). Here Craven plays with the traditional elements of horror, promising relief to the audience, but always going back on his promise. One of these visually stunning scenes is Mari’s death in the lake, when the camera lingers on her body in the water. At least one author has remarked that this is in reference to John Everett Millais’s painting of Ophelia, an “idyllic image of the death of an innocent,” but also “an omen precipitating further bloodshed.”23 It is these fast cuts between idylls and hell that are intended to jar the audience out of its complacency, thereby further complicating and undermining their suspension of disbelief and acting like an internal Brechtian estrangement effect, forcing them to “engage in the meaning of the film.”24 lu s t h o u s e o n t h e l e f t

If the stage had been set for hard-core sex in film, initially through pairing it with humor, as in Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), and later through more artistic endeavors (such as Damiano’s subsequent The Devil in Miss Jones from 1973), its twinning with violence would not have long to wait either. Indeed, while Radley Metzger’s adult work might be most famous for the extravagant and frequently slapstick comedy of The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), his previous (and less celebrated) The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974) features a rape sequence in which a woman is forced to perform sexual acts on an intruder at gun point. This jarring and uncomfortable moment would anticipate the later excess of the hard-core trend and also point towards how seemingly “acceptable” viewers of un-simulated sex films found, or were expected to find, a mixture of eroticism and horror appealing during the decade. Such a factor may also explain the reasoning behind Craven’s original plans for his debut (at least from a commercial standpoint).As mentioned before, Craven

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had also originally intended to make LHOTL a hard-core pornographic film, but without sacrificing the violence, meaning that the rape scenes would have featured actual penetration—not unlike Metzger’s The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann. However, the Metzger production was far from an anomaly. During a brief moment in the middle of the 1970s, the adult industry, which at the time was mostly based in New York, would begin to produce films with violent contemporary thriller narratives that contained often harrowing, but nonetheless pornographic, sequences. Even Damiano, who had made hardcore mainstream,25 got in on the act by mixing lurid, sensationalistic EC-comic bookstyle horror with graphic sex in Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974). The film even ends with a nod towards Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).Examples of even rougher examples of this movement would include Sex Wish (Victor Milt, 1976), a take-off, but on no account a parody, of Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974) starring Charles Bronson. As with the Winner original, which spawned numerous sequels of its own, Sex Wish features an innocent man plunged into a nightmare of mayhem after the murder of a family member. In this pornographic example, an architect’s wife is murdered, and the main protagonist of the film (Harry Reems) traces the killer (Zebedy Colt). Inevitably, there are scenes of hardcore intercourse interspersed with the brutality. Other— supposedly “serious”—XXX films include Forced Entry (1974, Shaun Costello), in which Harry Reems rapes and murders several Manhattan women, intercut with horrifying (newsreel) scenes from America’s conflict in Vietnam. As with LHOTL, one sees a “nightmare” on American soil that, allegorically, can be traced back to the dehumanisation of war—with Reems, like actor David Hess, an especially unlikeable and repugnant psychopath. Although these films remained a minority attraction, and reached a nadir with the notorious Water Power (Shaun Costello, 1977), in which the killer and rapist also forces his victims to endure humiliation with an enema, their subject matter (psycho-sexual rampage, harrowing scenes of rape) was close, if not comparable, to thematic elements of LHOTL and possibly complicate the text’s status as “art”— further explaining the censorial confusion. It is also worth noting that even more violent, albeit less sexually explicit, sound-alike films—including The Last House on Dead End Street (Roger Watkins, 1977), may have added to the legend of the Craven text, before the director’s name was better known and given “auteur” status. Such controversies, especially surrounding the mixture of sex and violence, perhaps caused LHOTL to be (wrongly) placed within this company and demonized. Craven, it should also be acknowledged, did himself no favors by also capitalizing on this brief trend in violent pornographic films. The director is long believed to have been responsible for The Fireworks Woman (1975), even appearing in the film as a Satanic manipulator and onlooker, urging the lead female character to give into her fantasies and reject the Church (it should be noted

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that Craven keeps his clothes on). The name of the filmmaker credited is Abe Snake, which appears over scenes of Craven himself, and the style and theme of The Fireworks Woman—as well as the use of the David Hess soundtrack from The Last House on the Left—makes it most likely that this is indeed his own work. The Fireworks Woman introduces us to a character called Angela (well-played by Jennifer Jordan), who wants to seek a sexual relationship with her brother (Eric Edwards, a veteran of this genre who also gives an impressive acting turn), but he has since rejected his feelings for her and joined the Priesthood. Angela goes on a journey of sexual exploration, scored to a classical music soundtrack (perhaps indicating the influence of Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones), which includes some jarring horror elements. In one encounter, Angela is brutally whipped in a bondage scenario, while in another a random man pins her down and rapes her. Shockingly, Craven indicates that the character enjoys her violation, even as the rapist crawls off her body and castigates her. The film concludes with brother and sister sailing out into the open sea, probably to commit suicide, while a Priest, and Craven as the Devil, look on. At least as stylish as some of the best pornographic films made after the success of Deep Throat, The Fireworks Woman uses uncomfortable taboos (whether rape fantasies or incest) to suggest that what Christian society dismisses as sinful thoughts nonetheless still exist and, if not acknowledged, could be unleashed as something more harmful. Prior to the conclusion, when her brother comes to her rescue, Angela’s insatiable desires lead to an aggressive and uncomfortable orgy with a room full of strangers. Clumsy as Craven’s analogy might be, this idea of repression eventually returning as a destructive force anticipates Robin Wood’s famous “American Nightmare” reading of the director’s work, and even the Freddy Krueger character. Taken within Craven’s wider body of accomplishments, The Fireworks Woman certainly makes more sense, including its use of dreams and nightmares—although one imagines that its obscurity, even among fans of the so-called ‘porno chic’ era, is due to the fact that the taboos it chose to depict were considerably darker than usual. the political reading

Thus, LHOTL did not arrive in a creative, social, or intellectual void. The specific historic situation within which it was created could already have offered the censors a hint as to why this film was to be taken seriously—choosing a route different from its contemporaries and instead turning to Bergman, rather than cheap (s)exploitation, for its influence, while drawing on the horrors of Vietnam. Robin Wood readily agrees: “My Lai was not an unfortunate occurrence out there; it was created within the American home. No film is more expressive than Last House of a(n) (inter)national social sickness; and no film

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is richer in Oedipal references—an extension, in its widest implications, of the minutiae of human relations under patriarchal capitalist culture.”26 This clear identification of the root causes for this film to be made also internationalizes the film and makes its initial German reception all the more puzzling. Wood correctly states that the social sickness the film thematizes and attacks is international in nature and a result of the “patriarchal capitalist culture” which dominated the world at the time. Barone builds on this analysis by stating: In Craven’s generation’s collective mind, the soldiers dying overseas were losing their lives as needlessly and matter-of-factly as The Last House on the Left’s two doomed young girls. To him, man’s ability to send youngsters to fight needless battles wasn’t far removed from a director subjecting ticket-buying audience members to an innocent teenage girl being forced to piss herself by her soon-to-be killer. That’s far scarier and more psychologically lasting than any fictional beast or demon. “The first monster you have to scare the audience with,” Craven once said in an interview, “is yourself.”27 After the fizzling out of the Hays Code in the 1950s and especially 1960s, and following the success of Herschell Gordon Lewis and his “splatter” films, arguably the major turning point for horror came with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). It was not so much the fact that Romero’s zombies were de-exoticised and were recruited from everyday common people that made this film a critical success; it was rather that it took up the topic of racial strife (Martin Luther King was shot dead the same year) in the society of the time and dared to star African-American actor Duane Jones as its doomed hero, shot by a redneck posse at the end. It is this kind of moral ambiguity that would inform many of the horror independents of the 70s as well, describing the development from secure to paranoid world views on-and off-screen (see Leeder28) and lowbrow “trash,” such as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975), that nonetheless invites an academic, political reading (for instance by Holwill/ Waddell 2019).29LHOTL is an equally important case in this line of argumentation. It shows the love generation in tatters and the peace sign, one of the icons of the hippie love generation before Manson, defiled; there is a pair of bumbling cops, signifying the breakdown of order; lastly, the film is invested in showing the retribution for youthful rebellion. Another important voice in this discussion is Teresa Goddu. Speaking about the gothic, she explains: “The gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it.”30 In LHOTL, this national identity is under threat due to the war in Vietnam and the perceived breakdown of morals at home from the “peace” generation. The re-/continued assertion of masculinity would be played quite literally on a woman’s back in Craven’s film. Gothic

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elements such as the house in the countryside, the perceived vulnerability of a woman “daring” to travel to the city alone, dress in modern urban clothes and not defer to males in conversation would have to be “righted” via extreme violence then avenged by a shattered and previously idealistic parental unit, exhausted by the unseen [class and social] “war” taking place on the streets.

c o n c lu s i o n

In 2013, Astrid Ackermann wrote the following on German Censorship history: Die Geschichte der Filmzensur in Deutschland ist ein wechselvoller staatsbürgerlicher Reifeprozeß, der sich über die politischen Herrschaften von vier verschiedenen Staaten erstreckt, ohne dabei seine Kontinuität zu verlieren.31 The history of film censorship in Germany is a changeable process of maturation, which stretches over the political regimes of four different states, without losing its continuity in the process. One can readily agree that Germany has liberalized its censorship processes considerably since the days when LHOTL made its debut. But one is not quite convinced that the continuity Ackermann enlists is something to celebrate just yet. As the foregoing has demonstrated, at least sometimes, censorship decisions—such as was the case with LHOTL—have been arbitrary, under-theorized and mired in controversy. In particular, five areas emerged within which such problematic decisions were taken. These will take some time to explain but will conclude this chapter. First of all, censorship had always been harder on films than on other cultural productions such as books. In itself, this is nothing new and a typical mainstay of how media changes, with new formats always bringing with them the alleged danger of social collapse, be they horror comics in the 50s or video games and death metal music in the 80s. However, it seems strange to continue adhering to such antiquated fears and propose them as guidelines for censorship practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially when much more research has been done on the impact of (moving) images in societies (cf. W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminal Picture Theory).32 Furthermore, horror fans are probably no more or less literate than other film fans, and the presumption of them misunderstanding the messages of the texts that they consume is speculative at best and patronizing at worst. Over the last fifty years, horror film (and horror film research) has also become a commanding genre within film history and studies. On the one hand, this might have to do with the continuous need to renew itself, a fact that Craven like no other director of his time recognized and exploited.

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Figure 2.3  The violence in The Last House on the Left kept it censored in Germany for decades

This is of course not only the case for horror, but as Telotte, Corrigan and others have demonstrated, also for any and all cult films.33, 34 An important contributing factor to horror’s popularity has been the cultural and especially technological changes it was able to use to its advantage, including the use of VHS.35 If in the 50s the B-movies of directors such as Roger Corman became a cultural force, this was partly due to the losses Hollywood had incurred in the late 40s and with the theatrical bookings that were opened by anti-monopoly laws. Horror would go on to reform itself again in the 60s as avant-garde and/or underground (anticipating work from George Romero, the emergence of feminist voices such as Stephanie Rothman, and even more left-field figures such as Italy’s Umberto Lenzi), further challenging censors and critics. By the 70s, the studios had quickly recognized the draw independent horror held over the box office, and they would continue to mainstream it throughout the 80s, but perhaps at the loss of its cultural and avantgarde functions (although Corman himself would invite female directors to helm his more subversive Slumber Party Massacre series, beginning with Amy Holden Jones in 1982, probably in response to accusations of misogyny within the “slasher” genre of the era). With the arrival of DVDs and streaming services, however, horror would experience an unprecedented global exposure, often fan driven, and would conquer new markets, but in a much-criticized postmodern pastiche fashion—including Craven’s own Scream (1996). What we may call the horror vérité style of LHOTL, founded in realism, would survive, however, and flourish into glossier “found footage” films—especially following the huge success of The Blair Witch Project (1999). To finally allow the release of LHOTL in Germany, uncut, within this postmodern and cinephile

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environment, was a safe move by the censors, as the film’s scathing cultural criticism, levied at the society at the time of their creation, had, at least in part, been rendered harmless in a more film-literate society which might also notice the technical weaknesses of this early benchmark. Secondly, when looking back at the censorship decisions in Germany regarding Craven’s film, it becomes clear that continuity was indeed practiced by the board. While portrayals of candid sexuality and violence could be accepted, the critique of governmental authority could not. More so than other issues, the Board indexed LHOTL because it dared to belittle authority, a practice that had ironically inspired global censorship initiatives and originated in imperial Germany. It seems that even democracy was unable to assuage authorities’ fragile egos and their fear of not being taken seriously. Thirdly, Kaspar Maasen’s research on mass art and people’s education during imperial times in Germany aptly demonstrates that the state insisted on its alleged right to use media to educate its citizens and inform them in specific ways. Writing about the mainstreaming of film around 1910, Maasen writes: Als besorgniserregend wahrgenommen wurde - über weite Strecken unabhängig vom Inhalt der Filme - das Kino als Verdichtungsort unterschichtlicher Sozialkultur und als unkontrollierbarer Treffpunkt Halbwüchsiger. [. . .] Bei der Konstruktion des neuen Mediums als Problem des Jugendschutzes waren vor allem Lehrer und Pfarrer, Presse und Sittlichkeitsverbände engagiert. 1915/16 wurde mit den Jugendschutzerlassen der Militärbehörden die Reglementierung jugendlichen Freizeitverhaltens derart verschärft, dass ihr repressiver Charakter deutlich hervortrat. 36 Cinema as defining space for the intermingling of different social cultures and as uncontrollable meeting point for youths began to be viewed as worrysome, independently of the content of the films screened. [. . .] It was foremost teachers and pastors, the press and moral action committees who were engaged in structuring the new medium as a problem for the protection of the youths. In 1915/16, youthful leisure time was regimented by the military authorities via the Ordinance for the Protection of Youths in such a harsh manner that its repressive character was easily discernible. This fear of the power of cinema as a (potential) driver and catalyst for social change continued, despite massive social alterations, into the 1970s and beyond, and includes implicit and explicit attempts to use film as a means for political and ideological indoctrination via Censorship Board decisions. This impetus remains the backdrop for Censorship Board decisions even today. The literal and metaphorical wagging of a moralizing index finger is an apt descriptor for

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this practice, a point that had already been raised in 1948,37 but which as a governmental practice has not been discontinued. This view is corroborated when comparing the cutting practices of the German version of LHOTL with the UK censorship, for instance, in which—in the latter case—only scenes of violence against women were cut.38 A fourth point this case raises is the fact that censorial decisions are oftentimes based on non-aesthetic judgements only. While it is not feasible for Board members to be familiar with all academic writing on the subject, based on the individual member’s professional background it should be possible to assume that at least some of them are aware of some of these considerations. It is very clear from this case that this factor had not happened. After all, the Board’s decision to index and ban the uncut LHOTL was taken in 1983, with subsequent actions stretching on for another thirty-eight years, and not once does it seem that applicable literature had been consulted. Having done so would have clearly demonstrated that there were many important points raised in the film and that it was far removed from any portrayal of motive-less violence message the Board alleged. The verdicts therefore do not testify to any due-diligence requirements having been followed, or, if indeed such scrutiny is not applied, it would speak for a systemic malfunction of the censorship system as a whole. LHOTL’s place in film history has been established beyond doubt and, as we have demonstrated above, its pioneering action of introducing modernism and even the legacy of filmmakers such as Bergman to new (and unlikely) audiences permits it to even be viewed as one of the most innovative films of its decade. All of this testimony was ignored by the German censorship board. It might be speculated, and this does offer some hope, that the decision to de-index LHOTL also took into account the many voices of horror fans, which have become much more vocal in the age of new media. If there were a few horror fanzines in the 1950s onward, it is through fan-based initiatives enabled through the internet that digital files of classic splatter-films are created. With its recent decision of September 5, 2019 to allow the release of an uncut FSK 18 version of LHOTL, the German Censorship Board has finally reversed its own prior decisions and provided a more enlightened justification for this. Largely, it followed the points listed in the application for release, detailing that the film does not revel in the portrayed violence or rapes; that the violence is internally justifiable; that most of the rape scenes happen off-screen and are portrayed from a victim’s perspective; that comparable films today have more hard-core scenes than LHOTL; and that according to today’s social standards, the film is not undermining the morals of youths (anymore). One other reason for allowing the film’s release is that according to today’s VFX standards, the scenes look outdated and that for instance the “blood” on Krug’s corpse looks so artificial that viewers cannot possibly take it seriously anymore. It is highly ironic that the film would be released based on the fact that any suspension of disbelief could not be upheld by it anymore, i.e. that it

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would be the breaking of cinematic illusion of the portrayal of real-time social violence that would make its viewing legal for the first time. This reasoning attempts to safely tuck away the film in an earlier period, to be viewed as a historic text, and not as a work of art whose subjects are as acute and jarring as they were fifty years ago. Last but not least, the history of LHOTL censorship throws a spotlight on today’s censorial practices. While the power of the film studios continues to erode, with many of them having been bought up by media companies, new players have entered and cornered the market. Internet media platforms such as Netflix, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have in effect begun to take over the censorial activities erstwhile sitting with national authorities and are largely at liberty to decide what content can and cannot be shown in their pages, with all of the cultural appropriations, the post-colonialisms, and the class and gender implications this has. Even more so, the new media, for better or for worse, question the feasibility of any future state censorship but leave the door wide open for other players to inject their own versions of unchecked censorship. This is a particularly ironic twist of fate, as this is the first time in media history that anybody can create moving images and disseminate them globally. Despite manifold technological changes designed to liberate artistic production, pre-, post-, and self-censorship continue on local and global levels, and while many fights have been won over the last forty years or so, filmic self-representation remains a precarious and fragile process so long as debates continue to surface about the necessity of a board of figures who seek to work against such platforms. The story of LHOTL is, therefore, one we can all learn from. What, at the time, struck so many as

Figure 2.4  The Last House on the Left (pictured are actors David Hess and Jeramie Rain) is now seen as a horror classic

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requiring urgent censorship is now deemed worthy of academic study and inclusion on courses that look at important American cinema of the 1970s. Kneejerk reactions to subversive material and its distribution, while likely to never vanish, are—one hopes—at least beginning to seem as antiquated as the idea that low budget horror, such as Craven’s early achievement, is somehow lesser or more “lowbrow” than canonical “masterpieces” of cinema.. N.B.: All translations by authors. The authors would also like to thank the incredible staff from a well-known American Coffee shop franchise at Gree Coast, Zhuhai, whose friendly demeanor greatly benefited the writing of this chapter. notes   1. For discussion of The Last House on the Left’s censorship battles, for instance, see Jonathan L. Crane, “Come On-a My House: The Inescapable Legacy of The Last House on the Left,” in Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, edited by Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik (Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002), 166–77.   2. Snuff, for instance, was banned as a “video nasty” in the UK and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also removed from circulation in Britain during the rental shop era.   3. Katharina Rein, Gestörter Film: Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (Marburg: Büchner-Verlag, 2012).   4. A quick proviso at the beginning of this section: While the following discusses censorship practices in Germany in general, it excludes censorship in the GDR (1949–89), as it does not pertain to the films at hand. Suffice it to say that LHOTL never made it to any screens in East Germany.   5. Personal correspondence with Jonas Hasbach, Bundeszentrale für Kinder- und Jugendmedienschutz (BzKJ), the German Federal Authority for Children and Youth Media Safety, August 2, 2021.   6. Ibid.   7. Ibid.   8. Ibid.   9. Matt Barone, ‘Master Class: How Wes Craven Reinvented the Horror Genre Three Decades in a Row’, (https://tribecafilm.com/news/wes-craven-obituary-tribute-lasthouse-on-left-nightmare-on-elm-street-scream, 2015, last accessed January 15, 2022). 10. Georg Böse, Der erhobene Zeigefinger. Die Filmzensur, ihre Geschichte und Soziologie (BadenBaden: Neue Verlags-Anstalt, 1948); important here is his usage of the trope of the raised index finger as moral impetus in German censorship. 11. I would like to thank my colleague Jakob Caspar Jurisch for alerting me to this last point. 12. M. Becker, “A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence” (Velvet Light Trap, No. 57, 2006), 42–59. 13. Fabian, Daniel, “Wes Cravens Skandalfilm: Dieser Horror-Klassiker ist nicht mehr indiziert!”, (http://www.filmstarts.de/nachrichten/18527287.html, 2019, last accessed January 15, 2022). 14. Julia Köhne and Tilo Renz, “And the Roads Lead to Nowhere. Die Jungfrauenquelle und Last House on the Left als Transformationen” (2003). Accessed January 15, 2022. Available from: http://www.f-lm.de/and-the-roads-lead-to-nowhere/.

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15. Michael Brashinsky, “The Spring, Defiled: Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left”, in Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, edited by Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 161–70). I should also note here that Mary appears to be brunette rather than blonde, at least to my eyes. 16. Ibid., 169. 17. See also Jeffrey Steven Podoshen, “Home Is Where the Horror Is: Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 35, No. 7 (October 3, 2018): 722–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2018.1472535. 18. cf. Jason Zinoman, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror (London & New York: Penguin, 2011), 219. 19. For a thorough discussion on the making of the film see: David A. Szulkin, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (Godalming: FAB, 2000 [1999]), particularly 35–6. 20. A case in point is Howard Thompson’s brief review in The New York Times of 22 December, 1972—see: www.nytimes.com/1972/12/22/archives/last-house-on-left.html. The review itself is short, but far from enthusiastic: In a thing (as opposed to a film) titled “Last House on the Left,” four slobbering fiends capture and torture two “groovy” young girls who airily explore the bad section of a town and more or less ask for trouble. When I walked out, after 50 minutes (with 35 to go), one girl had just been dismembered with a machete. They had started in on the other with a slow switchblade. The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven. It’s at the Penthouse Theater, for anyone interested in paying to see repulsive people and human agony. 21. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 112. 22. Ricky Fernandes Da Conceição, “Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House on the Left’—a genre landmark” (2016). Accessed January 15, 2022. Available from: https://goombastomp.com/ wes-cravens-last-house-left-genre-landmark/. 23. Sean Witzke, “Night of Vengeance: Wes Craven’s ‘The Last House on the Left’ 43 Years Later” (2015). Accessed January 15, 2022. Available from: https://grantland.com/ hollywood-prospectus/wes-craven-last-house-left-anniversary-obit/. 24. J. P. Telotte, “Beyond all Reason: The Nature of the Cult”, in J. P. Telotte (ed.), The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1991), 5–17. 25. Variety magazine would even compare Damiano’s The Devil in Miss Jones to more mainstream examples of cinema when praising its star Georgina Spelvin, arguing that “If Marlon Brando can be praised for giving his almost-all in Last Tango in Paris, one wonders what the reaction will be to Georgina Spelvin.” In “The Devil in Miss Jones Review”, Variety magazine (February 21, 1973, Variety Media, California), 24. 26. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, 114. 27. Matt Barone, “Master Class: How Wes Craven Reinvented the Horror Genre Three Decades in a Row” (2015). Accessed January 15, 2022. Available from: https://tribecafilm.com/news/ wes-craven-obituary-tribute-last-house-on-left-nightmare-on-elm-street-scream. 28. Murray Leeder, Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 56–7. 29. Naomi Holwill (director), Calum Waddell (producer), Fascism on a Thread—The Strange Story of Nazisploitation Cinema, documentary, 1 hr 31 min (High Rising Productions, Severin Films, 2019). 30. Teresa Goddu, Gothic America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 10. 31. Astrid Ackermann, Film und Filmrecht zwischen 1919 und 1939: als die Bilder laufen lernten (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013).

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32. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 33. Timothy Corrigan, “Film and the Culture of Cult,” in The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason, edited by J. P. Telotte (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991), 26–37. 34. Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema: An Introduction (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2011). 35. Mark Bernard, Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 36. Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen. Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850–1970 (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, [1995] 2001). 37. Cf. Peter Bär, Die verfassungsrechtliche Filmfreiheit und ihre Grenzen: Filmzensur und Filmförderung. Frankfurt and New York: P. Lang, 1984. 38. See: “BBFC Education/Case Studies—The Last House on the Left—”at: www.bbfc.co.uk/ education/case-studies/the-last-house-on-the-left

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3

The Hills Have Eyes as Folk Horror: a Discursive Approach Mikel J. Koven

A

cross the past ten years, folk horror has emerged as perhaps the most fashionable topic in horror scholarship. Paul Newland calls this enthusiasm for folk horror, for films old and new, “a contemporary ‘cultification’” of the sub-genre.1 However, as amateur groups online who likewise engage with folk horror have illustrated, pretty much anything old and vaguely weird can get thus labelled, and uncritically too. Rather than offer a concrete definition of what folk horror is, I would like to suggest a discursive methodology to see what signification befalls a text when labelled “folk horror.”2 Folk horror exists at the convergence of three discourses—the Pagan, the Rural, and the Folklore. By discourse, I refer to those ideas initially suggested by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge, wherein discourse analysis is a means of qualitative study which enables us to explore beyond the surface meaning of a text; to explore not only what a text says, but more significantly to recognize the power inequity of those discussions and looking to what the text cannot say. Discourse refers to what can be said about a topic; it is determined by dominant, that is hegemonic, power imbalances that limit the possibilities about what can be said/uttered. We can only discuss something—anything—in ways and to the ends that our society allows us. We cannot think beyond the limits of our society, despite any alternative possibilities, since such cannot be uttered because language, as a social construct, does not permit it. Any discourse, when manifested through analysis, must be viewed as a product, or limitation, of those who control it. To illustrate this, I will first define and discuss these three discourses as a kind of discursive methodology. Secondly, I will apply this methodology to one of Wes Craven’s most famous early films, The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

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pa g a n / ru r a l / f o l k ( l o r e )

While the idea may be contentious, the word “Pagan,” in its historic usage, refers exclusively to an undifferentiated Other to the Christian. It is an antonymic word, in its Latin original (paganus), referring to those outside of the Christian belief system. While popular etymology suggests the word referred simply to “country dwellers,” Alan Cameron, in The Last Pagans of Rome, illustrates how, in the wake of the Constantinian shift to Christianity across the Roman empire, thereby creating the first Christian empire, the word’s popularity increased, and referred to those who existed outside of Christian life, rather than just those who lived outside of the Empire’s cities.3 “Pagan,” therefore according to Cameron, is a blanket antonym that refers to those non-Christians for whom the Christian could not inculcate into the Christian grand-narrative (as in the Judeo-Christian tradition: the belief that Christianity emerges from Judaism). In this example, Judaism (or any other belief system Christianity recognizes) is not Pagan, because Christianity has included it in its own, self-serving chronicle. Pagan, in this regard, consists of those Christianity cannot consume into its own story; it is Other because it lies outside of cognitive categories deemed meaningful by hegemony. The Pagan is Other because it refuses to recognize Christianity’s “truth” and is therefore unable to be absorbed into the hegemonic order. One might also say, recognizing the psychoanalytic concept of the “return of the repressed,” Paganism was that murdered by Christianity and then the murder thusly denied. The Pagan is the Christian abject—Paganism’s revival appears like Banquo’s ghost reminding the Church of its atrocities in the name of its God. Such a discursive dynamic may also partially explain why contemporary Paganism is so popular with those who, likewise, not only wish to disavow Christian hegemony but also seek to be as wholly Other to that hegemony as possible. Cameron’s etymological analysis (a discursive one no less) is not as straightforward as it might appear. Cameron identifies the emergence of the word “pagan” to be a non- (or at least, less-) prejudicial way for Christians to refer to those outside of their own communities and who, therefore, existed merely as Other. Herein lies the beginnings of how we can see the word “Pagan” discursively: the word as concept is only meaningful for those within the power structures of the social hegemonic. It has become a Christian concept for those who either refuse to be absorbed into the Christian master narrative, or whose alternatives render themselves epistemologically invisible. To identify the Pagan is to do so from the perspective of Christian hegemony, regardless of whether such an individual is in agreement with, or in opposition to, the social power structures of that society. Even to be in opposition to Christianity, to be anti- or non-Christian, is still to recognize the centrality of Christianity to

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Figure 3.1  With its desert location, The Hills Have Eyes draws on folklore of an older and less settled America

the viewing position by its opposition. For the Pagan, to identify as Pagan is nonsensical because to do so would be to recognize the hegemonic power of the Church. As Cameron notes, “Fourth-century pagans naturally never referred to themselves as pagans, less because the term was insulting than because the category had no meaning for them.”4 The term only had meaning for a Christian. While contemporary Pagans may self-identify as such, it is important to recognize that the word itself is anatomically derived as a catch-all term for those outside of Christianity, and not to refer to any specific set of cultural practices or beliefs. Identifying the Pagan with any kind of pre-Christian belief system still puts Christianity at the heart of the discourse; the ancient Celtic religion, to use a crude characterization within popular culture, as in the classic folk horror film The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), is only a pre-Christian belief system insofar as it was ultimately displaced by Christianity. Christianity is the victor; what existed prior to such epistemological genocide is only reported by the hegemonic order of the Church and is ultimately secondary to the winning belief system. Such thinking denies the Pagan any agency in their own existence; they can only be seen through Christian eyes. Such a construction is particularly relevant when discussing the troglodyte family in The Hills Have Eyes. `Within the folk horror discussions currently in vogue, Paganism slips synonymously towards Witchcraft and even Satanism; one becomes the other, despite these three being quite different things. What all three terms have in common is their discursive relationship to Christian hegemony, the default viewer position. It is less an issue of Paganism=Witchcraft=Satanism than

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it is between those who recognize Christian hegemony and those for whom Christianity is irrelevant to their existence. This is the first discourse. The concept of the Rural is at once so self-evident as to not warrant definition,5 but any such dismissal is a distraction from the power imbalances within the discourse itself. The US Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, for example, defines “rural” as simply “not-urban,” and derived predominantly from data supplied by the (US) Census Office and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).6 Rurality, and therefore urbanity, could be defined in a similar way to Pagan but almost solely on population densities. Such a definition excludes rural self-definition in lieu of the power imbalance which sees epistemological urban entitlement dominating the very material issues of who has, for example, access to health care. This issue is also particularly relevant when considering Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes. Furthermore, the Rural dominates folk horror discourse. Adam Scovell’s “folk horror chain,”7 which the author defines as a “causational narrative theory,”8 is almost entirely subsumed within the discourse of Rural. Scovell defines his theory thus: “The Folk Horror Chain . . . can be seen as the hyphen between . . . depicted, horrific events [in these films]; its descriptor as a chain being more than simply for evocation but specifically to highlight connections and strong ties between cause and effect, idea and action, the summoning and summoned.”9 This causational “chain” connects the landscape to isolation within that landscape, wherein communities thus isolated develop “skewed belief systems and morality” (i.e. Pagan, as discussed above), and such beliefs culminate in a “happening” or “summoning.”10 While Scovell gives some recognition to the discourse of Pagan (his “skewed belief systems and morality”), the centrality of the landscape in his theory roots folk horror within the discourse of the Rural, but he does not interrogate the Rural as discourse, as a negotiated space of ideological division. This same point was identified by Thurgill, who noted “it derives from a deliberate attempt to exploit the othering process manifest in the presentation of pastoral communities as something outside of the normative.”11 The Rural, therefore, is the second discourse. The key discourse least developed from almost all discussions of folk horror is that which seemingly gives the genre its name: Folklore. Scovell defines folk horror, in part, as “a work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purpose.”12 Despite this definition of folk horror, neither Scovell nor almost anyone else bother to define what Folklore is.13 Folklore simply exists in the folk horror discussions in a popular “common-sense” guise. With “Folklore,” folk vaguely know what is meant by the word sufficiently; it does not need further considered definition. But such understanding obscures seeing the discourse(s) inherent (or possible) in Folklore and its academic study. The word, Folk-Lore,

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was coined by William John Thoms in 1846 to describe “the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time.”14 Thoms’s own definition/coinage was designed to replace the previously used term, “popular antiquities,” which covered the material Thoms lists. And left at this definitional level, folk horror duplicates such understandings. Reading Folklore as discourse, however, focuses on Tradition’s role and relationship to the lore; as Bauman notes, “Tradition has figured prominently in definitions . . ., but folklorists tend to place especially great emphasis on traditionality as a criterial attribute of folklore.”15 Bauman continues, “To view an item of folklore as traditional is to see it as having temporal continuity, rooted in the past but persisting into the present in the manner of a natural object.”16 It is very much in this sense that the folk horror scholars understand their texts’ and authors’ use of Folklore. Folklore in folk horror are the items from the past which have persisted to the contemporary. It is insufficient to simply itemize the lore in a text; the discursive aspects of Folklore need interrogation. In the case of The Hills Have Eyes, the central folkloristic element requiring analysis is the legend of the Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and how that legend is modernized in the film, which shall be discussed below. Folklore, therefore, embodies the tension between Tradition and Contemporality in what Barre Toelken refers to as the “twin laws” of Folklore: that in any given time and place, an item of Folklore will embody elements of both continuities to the past and readaptations in the present.17 And in this regard, a folk narrative circulated in eighteenth-century England is adapted to the United States in the twentieth century. The discourse of Tradition is central to the discourse of Folklore, which recognizes the items from the past haunting the contemporary, but also the meaning(s) such traces suggest. This is also noted by Scovell, who further defines folk horror as “a work that presents a clash between such arcania [sic.] [items of folklore, ‘popular antiquities’] and its presence within close proximity to some form of modernity.”18 The haunting by Tradition, in this regard, is particularly apt for the discussion of folk horror. It is the return of the cultural repressed, to paraphrase Robin Wood.19 Folklore tends to get lost in the discussion of folk horror, usually due to the emphasis, beginning with Scovell, on the landscape (without going so far as reading the Rural as discourse, as noted above). It cannot be sufficient to simply identify items of Folklore in a folk horror text without investigating the attitude(s) towards, and meaning(s) of, such “popular antiquities.” “Tradition . . . [must be] seen as a selective, interpretive construction, the social and symbolic creation of a connection between aspects of the present and an interpretation of the past.”20 Folklore does not simply hide in the mountains awaiting mobile homes to break down before it reveals itself; it is a continuous process of signification. Folklore as discourse surely, therefore, must be at the center of any consideration of folk horror; it is conspicuously absent from most of the discussions. Folklore, in this sense, is the third discourse.

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Folk horror, then, is the convergence of these three discourses: Pagan, Rural, and Folklore. While each can be considered in isolation, folk horror is only meaningful, or can only be said to be meaningful, when the three discourses come together. And all three should be taken into consideration for the analysis of the folk horror text. the hills have eyes

(1 9 7 7)

The Hills Have Eyes, while not often considered “folk horror” per se, illustrates how the folk horror discourses, outlined above, open the film text up to understanding the cultural significations implicit within the wider narrative. In the film, the white bourgeoise family, the Carters, are driving their way to California to celebrate patriarch “Big Bob” Carter’s retirement. The family chooses to detour off the highway to find the silver mine the Carters were given as an anniversary present. Finding themselves lost in the Nevada desert, Bob accidentally crashes the car in the middle of nowhere. Unbeknownst to them, the Carter clan is watched by another family—but one of cannibal troglodytes, headed by Papa Jupiter, in the surrounding hills. While immobilized in the desert, Papa Jupiter’s clan prepares to attack the Carters for food (and as food) as well as any valuables they may be carrying which could be traded with Fred, the gas station owner (and Jupiter’s father) who marks the end of civilization before the Badlands. The two families engage in hostilities, killing each other off. At its most obvious narrative level, Craven’s film illustrates how the savagery met by the Carters is returned in kind; that a mobile home is all that separates civilization from devolving into barbarity.21 Applying the folk horror discursive methodology, I am suggesting here, however, opens the text up further. First, let us begin with the concept of the Pagan: the opposition of the two families is set up as the opposition between Christianity (the Carters) with a Pagan Other (the troglodytes).22 The Carters’ Christianity is explicit: matriarch Ethel insists on Christian prayer, for protection, before Big Bob and son-in-law Doug go off in different directions to find help. Ironically, and perhaps indicative of Craven’s rejection of the dogmatic Christianity he was raised in, this prayer saves neither Big Bob nor Ethel. As John Wooley notes: “Big Bob’s racist attitudes and profane talk hardly go with his being a man of faith, but when it comes time to lead the family members in a prayer for their survival, he’s the one who talks to God for them. Perhaps this is Craven’s comment on the hypocrisy of many who call themselves Christians but behave in a manner not endorsed by the teachings of Jesus.”23 The Carters are thus set up as the film’s centre, the point of identification for the audience; however, such an assumption becomes immediately problematic in the implicit suggestion that Craven’s audience is likewise white, (vaguely) Christian, and middle-class.24 Big Bob is retiring from the police

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force and has been gifted with a powerful handgun instead of the stereotypical gold watch. Big Bob is thus inscribed, not only as the white heteronormative Christian, but also as the embodiment of law and order in America; one who seemingly further embodies right-wing, NRA-associated ideas about personal gun possession. Even before we begin to discuss the troglodytes properly, we can note that they wear bones as jewelry and are dressed in untailored animal skins, which combined with their “savagery” strongly suggests Craven is making a visual connection with the Hollywood stereotypes of Native Americans. Returning to the implicit power relations between the two families, the Carters (and all that they embody) are cutting through the wilderness, the Frontier if you will, holding some paper (which we never actually see) that promises them ownership of a poorly defined piece of land. Much like the covered wagons that American mythology suggests “civilized” the Frontier (through the genocide of the indigenous populations in the Americas), the Carters are traveling in a mobile home. Whiteness, Christianity, law and order, the (wrongly interpreted) 2nd Amendment (to the American Constitution), social and physical mobility, as well as the overall structure and representation of the American nuclear family, establishes the Carters as the film’s center. While both Big Bob and Ethel die in the film, the three Carter children, Lynne Carter’s husband Doug, their baby Katy, and even one of the family’s dogs ultimately survive. Big Bob and Ethel are presented as slightly ridiculous: while Ethel is clearly made to look naïve and silly (she mistakes the blue lines on the map for roads), Big Bob is the one who crashes the car, not because of troglodyte sabotage (that occurs in the 2006 remake), but because American fighter planes (from the nearby air force base) spooked him when they zoomed too close to the road, and then he swerves to avoid a small bunny in his way. For all their assumed authority, the elder Carter parents, and that which they embody, are discreetly disavowed by their children—Brenda, Bobby, Lynne, and Doug; a generational, and admittedly broad, shift from Republican to Democrat, if you will.25 This is where the Carter family structure is significant; the overall values of the parents may be altered or modified in the younger generation, but they are never fully rejected. Doug’s unproblematic presence in the family is further suggestive: as played by Martin Speer, Doug is given a vaguely Jewish vibe (the actor is Jewish). Doug, at least at the start of the film, is soft and uncomfortable around guns, preferring to be present around the women rather than manly men like Big Bob. And in spite of Big Bob’s slightly disapproving looks towards his son-in-law, when Ethel asks for a family prayer before the two older men go off to look for help, Doug is, of course, included in that explicitly Christian (but non-denominational) prayer. In other words, Doug (and his Jewishness) is co-opted into the Christian hegemonic via his marriage and acceptance into the Carter family. He has effectively become part of that hegemonic mainstream which erases or disavows

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his own cultural belief traditions as they are distinct from Christianity. Much like the implications of heteronormativity in the film, Christian normativity is simply the default family setting in American culture. Brenda, Bobby, and Lynne might not hold any particular religious views themselves, but a quick invocation to the Christian God for protection is as normal as opening presents on Christmas morning. To be part of a regular, normal, typical family in America, the film suggests, requires at least tacit acceptance of Christ in one form or another. Anything else, like Doug’s quiet Jewishness, is abnormal and abject: it simply does not, or should not, exist. And must be absorbed into the Christian hegemonic, assuming it can be. Doug’s absorption into the Carters’ American Christian normativism is finalized in his “baptism” at the end of the film: the intense medium shot of Doug towering over us as he bludgeons Mars to death. The soft, weak, Jewish girly-man has become the strong, powerful, Pagan-defeating, American man, protector of his baby daughter. This is the triumph of American Christian normativity in the guise of the American Christian family. “American Christian normativity” may be a provocative turn of phrase. By this term, I refer to how cultural texts within popular culture, in film and television series specifically, normalize the experience of “Christianity.” The phrase is obviously taken from Gender Studies, specifically the term heteronormativity: the sense that the default setting in reading any popular culture text is heterosexual; it is the preferred gendered position. So too does “American Christian normativity” suggest that the default cultural setting within American popular culture is (in some way) Christian; it too is the “preferred position.”26 According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s (PRRI) 2020 survey, 68.5 per cent of those Americans surveyed between 2014 and 2020 identified as in some ways “Christian”, with 30 per cent identifying themselves as “White Protestant” (both Evangelical and “mainline” (i.e. non-Evangelical)), the single largest group.27 According to the Pew Research Center, in 2007, Christians made up 78 per cent of the American public, and by 2014, that number had dropped to 70.6 per cent: therefore, the 68.5 per cent cited by the PRRI in 2020 is in-keeping with the decline in Christian identification.28 If we can extrapolate from these figures in the opposite direction, it is relatively easy to suggest that in 1977, when The Hills Have Eyes was made, the percentages were higher.29 Of those who identified as Protestant (white and black, Evangelical and “mainline”), 33 per cent identified as Baptist specifically, the single largest Protestant denomination in the US, and the context in which Craven himself was raised.30 None of these statistics, however, reflect actual religious service attendance or active worship, but the taken-for-granted, de facto world view for the majority of Americans. The denominational identity of a particular experience of Christianity is moot, as the entirety of American Christianity

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has been “processed” into a unified experience encompassing all Christian denominations, from all geographic areas, as a kind of American vernacular cultural koine. In this regard, Martin’s (equally vague) Jewishness is absorbed into this American Christian normativity, wherein certain Judaisms31 can be simply read as other forms, or extensions, of Christianity (as is suggested by the Judeo-Christian tradition). Much like the relationship between “American cheese” (like Kraft singles) and actual cheddar, “American Christian normativity” is a kind of processed version of religious identification, but one which is ubiquitous in American popular culture, and rarely is its presence questioned. When a group is not able to be absorbed into the Christian hegemonic, it must be destroyed and erased from memory. Otherwise, such beliefs might return as unwelcome as weeds are in a garden; this is Wood’s “return of the repressed” again. Such is the fate of the troglodyte family of Papa Jupiter. The first and most obvious element to note is the naming of the family members. The men in the family are all named after Roman (that is, Pagan) gods: Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Pluto.32 It is curious though that Craven does not name his troglodyte women similarly: the matriarch is simply Mama and the clan’s daughter is Ruby, despite the availability and appropriateness of Juno and either Minerva or Venus. The Carters are not named explicitly after Christian figures; instead, they are given bland and generic (White, Christian) American names. Papa Jupiter’s clan is set up as a Manichean opposite to the Carter clan. While the Carters have religion, there is no evidence to support any kind of belief system in operation amongst the troglodytes, no invocation to any

Figure 3.2  Michael Berryman played a memorable villain in The Hills Have Eyes as Pluto

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kind of non-Christian deity. This is significant in that, at least as suggested by Foucault, Craven does not bestow any belief traditions to Jupiter’s clan. What do they believe? We can never know because the language—written (as in the script) or visual (as in the film text itself)—cannot comprehend any alternative sufficiently to be named. The troglodytes are Othered to such a degree that our shared language cannot even say what their beliefs are; they are not just beyond our language, they are beyond our comprehension. We can only infer certain cultural values when they directly impact us (via the Carters). Taking this to the next level then, the Other can only exist when it can be seen by the White Christian hegemony in the West. It is not so much that the hills have eyes, as we have the eyes in which to see the hills’ eyes. The racist and stereotypical representations of Native North Americans throughout popular culture likewise erase consideration of any indigenous belief traditions (other than, perhaps, via anthropology or Folklore studies). Unlike the religious colonial projects which characterized the annihilation of Celtic belief traditions in Europe, where Christianity replaced what in The Wicker Man is referred to as “the Old Gods,” there were no (apparent) gods to be replaced in North America to begin with. In bringing Christianity to the Americas, colonialism saw itself as simply filling a spiritual void, not replacing “old” with “true”. In the HBO television series Westworld, when an android host encounters something which does not exist in its programming, it is set-up to say “that doesn’t look like anything to me”; when Europeans invaded the Americas, they too were programmed to simply “not see” what was already there. For the colonial occupiers of the Americas, indigenous belief traditions simply “did not look like anything” to them. In this way, the Paganism (as discourse) of The Hills Have Eyes is that neither the Carters nor Craven can see what an Other to Christian normativity could be. It is not simply the Pagan names given to Jupiter’s clan in the film that suggest the Paganism here; it is also the void with which Craven, or the Carter clan, sees in the troglodyte family. The Other exists beyond comprehension and beyond language. Jupiter’s family is simply an obstacle to be killed by the Carter family; they exist in order to be eradicated or co-opted into (White, Christian) civilization. Right at the beginning of the film, Fred discovers Ruby trying to escape Jupiter’s clan and chastises her dreams that she could find acceptance outside of the Nevada desert. While Ruby is the one survivor of the troglodytes, The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1984) in part deals with the character’s introduction into the Christian normative world of Bobby Carter. With the exception of Ruby, the remainder of her clan are all killed. Much as the Roman gods (specifically Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Pluto) were killed by Christianity following the fourth century CE to ensure the survival of future generations of Christian civilization, here embodied by Bobby, Brenda, Lynne, Doug, and baby Katy.

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The discourse of the Rural builds directly off the Pagan: the cinematic geography of the film presents the Nevada desert as barren and empty, and by extension, that association is placed on those who live there. Earlier, I alluded to the similarity of the Carters’ mobile home with the covered wagons which brought European settlers/occupiers across the continent. Stranded in this barren wasteland, the Carters are relatively self-sufficient, at least for the time being. They have provisions with them, and a full kitchen complete with a refrigerator. These indices of civilized modernity are juxtaposed with the subsistence existence of Jupiter’s clan, living hand to mouth, and while they have the ability to make fire and cook meat (the fate of the Carters’ other dog, Beauty), as we see when Mars and Pluto invade the mobile home, they are quite happy to eat food raw, including ground beef or a pet canary. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in The Raw and the Cooked, divided cultures into those who eat their foods raw versus those who cook their food as a metaphor for the relative development of differing groups of people; concepts of “the barbaric” vs “the civilized.”33 This distinction between “raw” and “cooked” cultures is transparently illustrated by the film: the troglodytes (mostly) eat raw foods, while the Carters cook theirs. The geography and the availability of resources to the region are what enable/force Jupiter’s clan into the scavenging culture the Carters encounter. Despite its dilapidation and the surrounding piles of rotting cars and modernity’s detritus, Fred’s “Oasis”, the gas station, is the marker of this frontier, where civilization ends, and the wilderness begins. Ironically, if we are to follow the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy’s definition of rurality and the availability of resources based on population density, the desolate hills of the Badlands have a greater population than Fred’s Oasis. There are six times the number of people in the Badlands than at Fred’s Oasis. And yet, as dilapidated as the gas station is, it benefits from some water supply and electricity (utilities absent in Papa Jupiter’s cave), even though an outhouse is still the only option for human waste disposal. This imbalance suggests Fred, despite being on his own, receives more of the infrastructure resources than Jupiter (who has a whole family to support) due to his nominal adherence to the rules and laws of civilization. So government expenditure of resources based on population density, despite being the NGOs official policy, is exposed as a lie: those who are willing to even nominally participate and be co-opted into the American normative (with all of its attendant assumptions, some of which are noted above) are more likely to get a share of the resources than those who reject them, regardless of actual need. The third discourse addresses the Folklore in the film and the Folklore’s connection to tradition. Craven has made explicit that The Hills Have Eyes is loosely based on the legend of the Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean.34 The legend notes that in the late sixteenth century, while James VI was still King

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of Scotland (before becoming James I of England), a feral family was discovered living in a cave in Ayrshire. For apparently decades, this family, led by Alexander “Sawney” Bean and his wife “Black” Agnes Douglas had been attacking travelers on the adjacent road, dragging their bodies back to the cave and ransacking their possessions for anything of value. No survivor was ever left to tell the tale, until one man managed to escape their clutches, although his traveling companion was not so lucky. The alert was raised, and the King’s men found Sawney and his clan in their cave. The cave itself was a veritable house of horrors, with dismembered human remains hung up to cure, while other remains were in jars or barrels for pickling. Piles of discarded jewelry, clothes, money, and other valuables were scattered about the premises, seemingly unaware that these items had any value. Sawney’s clan, when finally arrested and taken to Edinburgh, consisted of many children, of both sexes, and even more grandchildren, mostly the result of incestual relations. Once under arrest and in Edinburgh, rather than waste time and money on a trial, the clan was summarily executed: the men and boys had their genitals, hands, and feet cut off and were left to bleed to death, while the women and girls were burned alive in a bonfire.35 The connection to Papa Jupiter’s clan in the Craven film should be obvious, although the interior of the cave suggests more of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre vibe, than anything in Hills 36. Quoting John Kenneth Muir, Wooley recognizes that “Craven realized that by updating the Sawney Bean story to 20th Century California [sic.], he would have the opportunity not only to comment on a cult society dwelling inside modern civilization, but also the chance to comment on that civilization’s less-thancivilized retribution against the cannibals.”37 Legend, as a distinct genre of folk literature, can be difficult to define accurately. Elliott Oring’s definition is worth quoting at length: Legends are considered narratives which focus on a single episode, an episode which is presented as miraculous, uncanny, bizarre, or sometimes embarrassing. The narration of a legend is, in a sense, the negotiation of the truth of these episodes. This is not to say that legends are always held to be true . . . but at the core of the legend is an evaluation of its truth status. . . . This diversity of opinion [on the truth of a legend] does not negate the status of the legend because, whatever the opinion, the truth status of the legend is what is being negotiated. In a legend, the question of truth must be entertained even if that truth is ultimately rejected. Thus, the legend depicts the improbable within the world of the possible. The legend never asks for a suspension of disbelief. It is concerned with creating a narrative whose truth is at least worthy of deliberation; consequently, the art of legendry engages the listener’s sense of the possible.38

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Belief or disbelief in the historical accuracy of the Bean story is, following from Oring, irrelevant. It does not matter if there was such a man who did these dreadful things, but whether or not the episodes recounted were possible. What does matter, and this is where the Folklore becomes discursive, is that the accounts of Sawney Bean did not emerge prior to the 1730s, in English sources (not Scottish), more than 100 years after the events supposedly occurred. Much in the same dynamic as the Christian defines the Pagan by what it is not, so too does the Englishman define the Scot. The first printed sources of the Sawney Bean legend emerge after the first two uprisings to try and re-establish the Roman Catholic House of Stuart on the English throne, the so-called Jacobite Rebellions of 1689 and 1715. Scottish, Irish, and some northern English Catholics supported James Edward Stuart’s (the Old Pretender; son of James II) claim to the throne, while the predominantly Protestant English supported the Hanoverian monarchs, William and Mary. Jacobite rebellion continued into 1745 with this final uprising, now supporting James Edward’s son, Charles Edward Stuart’s (Bonnie Prince Charlie) claim to the English throne. So the Sawney Bean story emerges after the first two and just before the third Jacobite rebellion, in a time when vilifying the Scots, who supported the Jacobites (by and large), would have avid support.39 The Sawney Bean story emerges at a time when anti-Scottish propaganda was at its peak throughout England.40 Bringing Oring back into the discussion, the legend of Sawney Bean asks whether or not it is possible that such a feral clan of highwaymen and cannibals could exist like that, living in a cave and attacking travelers. Under the political situation between Scotland and England, and from an English perspective, the answer would have been a resounding yes. The characterization of the Scot as impoverished, cannibalistic, incestuous, criminal, murderous, and perhaps more to the point, devolved, than the Englishman had a strong resonance in the first half of the eighteenth century. The imagery in the Sawney Bean story creates a monstrous Other; Other, that is, to the refined Protestant Englishmen (and women) who circulated this story. Sawney stood for all Scotsmen (and “Black” Agnes for all Scottish women): Scotland was a nation of robbers and murderers, who would kill you for no other reason than to evade capture by leaving no witnesses alive. They lacked proper housing, preferred living in caves, building their monstrous broods through incest, and feeding them via cannibalism (presumably none of the clan ever saw a vegetable or fruit). The clan, and therefore by extension all Scots, are characterized as so debased and ignorant of the basic values of civilization that they had no understanding of the value of money, or jewels, or fine clothes which they hoarded for no apparent reason or end other than to ensure a lack of evidence from the site where their victims met their deaths. As Gordon Pentland noted, in his discussion of imagery of the Scots in mid-eighteenth-century political publications, “[the Sawney Bean story]

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relied for its force on representations which owed their origins to a range of sources and offered printmakers a variety of apparently less political qualities relating to personal hygiene, diet, sexual potency and the like with which to pillory Scots.”41 Further on in the article, Pentland refers to a popular English printed postcard . . . which showed a ghoulish emaciated Scot at the mouth of a cave. [. . .] The image of a ghoulish Scottish savage standing in front of a cave [. . .] also appeared in woodcuts and in texts dealing with the Scot who might have been the best known in popular culture. This was Sawney Bean, the cannibal, whose story would have reached an exceptionally wide audience through its inclusion in popular compendia of criminality.42 Even the clan’s bloody end is indicative of Scottish barbarity. The power elite in Edinburgh foregoes the necessity of a trial and proceeds immediately to horrific forms of execution, making them just as bad as Sawney and his family: women and girls burned alive while the men and boys are mutilated and allowed to bleed out. Presumably, this macabre theatrical event, the executions, was also public, entertainment for all of Edinburgh to enjoy. The brutality of Sawney’s clan is met with nearly equal barbarity of Scottish justice; and not unlike the brutality with which the Carters return onto the troglodytes. The troglodytes in The Hills Have Eyes are presented as equally sub-human as the Scots are presented in eighteenth-century English, anti-Jacobite propaganda. When Fred retells to Big Bob the story of Jupiter’s birth, he characterizes the monstrous child as being something other than human. I have already noted the bone jewelry, and fur and skin clothes Jupiter’s clan wears, suggesting popular Western stereotypes of Native North Americans. But in much the same way that Sawney Bean was a cautionary tale about traveling through Scotland, the troglodytes are a warning for those who stray from the established routes across the US. Even in the US, there are areas in the backof-beyond where economic hardships become social and cultural deprivation, at least, so the legends tell us—in films like Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Hills Have Eyes to name just the most obvious examples. Had the Carters stayed to the freeway, the film notes, they would already be in California. Here, the function of legend storytelling is not only to tell a terrifying tale, but also to ensure the cultural admonitions about straying from civilization’s well-worn routes are maintained. And in this regard, The Hills Have Eyes, in modernizing and Americanizing the Sawney Bean story, fulfils similar functions to the original. While the mid-eighteenthcentury English would read of Sawney’s exploits in cheaply published broadsheet publications, so do twentieth and twenty-first-century Westerners watch as Papa Jupiter’s clan try to kill and then eat the unlucky Carter clan, in a low

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Figure 3.3  Lance Gordon as the sub-humanoid troglodyte Mars, an evocation of the Pagan.

budget horror movie. The original readership of the broadsheet would unlikely have had any opportunity to travel through Ayrshire, just as few of us have the opportunity to drive a mobile home through the Nevada desert. But the stories we tell of these areas, and the dangers they possess, remain largely unchanged across the centuries. c o n c lu s i o n s

What makes The Hills Have Eyes a folk horror film is not simply the rural landscape the narrative is set in; it is how these three discourses inform and reflect on one another, opening the text to further discussion and analysis. Robin Wood, writing in 1980, cited The Hills Have Eyes specifically as “a work that, while it has not to my knowledge received serious critical treatment, is scarcely unknown”43— it is a popular film, or at least widely known, and yet has not been picked up for scholarly debate (at least in the few years following the film’s release). The “Pagan” characterization of Papa Jupiter’s clan, of being wholly Other to American Christian normativity, is visually emphasized by the troglodytes existing in the barren landscape of the Nevada Badlands. In adapting the Sawney Bean legend to late twentieth-century America, Craven reiterates the same warnings about straying too far from the path—whether that path is literally the freeway, modernity (particularly how one prepares food—raw or cooked, meat or man),

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or vague and bland Protestant Christianity—processed Christianity, if you will. In doing this, Craven also opens the discussion to previous representations about the dangers of the Frontier, the classic Hollywood Western specifically, and the visual representation of “native savagery,” now no longer racialized, but sitespecific. If the film can be read as “bad lands breed bad people,” the ghost of Sawney Bean haunts such readings too. Seeing the key discourses of the Pagan, the Rural, and Folklore converging opens the film text to additional discussions beyond the now trite representation of the rural and spooky old stuff which dominates folk horror discussions. Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis offers a reading protocol that suggests investigating how power inequity shapes and controls the processes of signification, illustrating larger ideological issues which any appreciation of these films must contend with. Of course, understanding any aspect of cultural hegemony is de rigueur for film scholarship, but examining key aspects of folk horror in particular, through the lens of discourse analysis enables us to engage in discussions larger than the film can present on its surface. With this said, the ambivalent discourses of Folklore and tradition further complicate such explorations in that we can neither completely abandon our cultural pasts, nor can we always face the repercussions of those pasts. The gist is, in light of the analyses presented here, that any discussion must take into account the power relations inherent in that discussion.

Figure 3.4  The Hills Have Eyes (pictured is actress Susan Lanier) launched Wes Craven onto bigger projects

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notes   1. Paul Newland, “Folk Horror and the Contemporary Cult of British Rural Landscape: The Case of Blood on Satan’s Claw,” in British Rural Landscapes on Film, edited by Paul Newland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 163.   2. In a recent special issue of the journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, guest editor Dawn Keetley offers a highly comprehensive discussion of various definitions of “folk horror” (see Dawn Keetley, “Editor’s Introduction,” Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies in the Supernatural 5 (2020). Accessed December 2, 2022. Available from: https://www. revenantjournal.com/issues/folk-horror-guest-editor-dawn-keetley/.   3. Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).   4. Cameron, Last Pagans, 27.   5. See Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017) and James Thurgill, “A Fear of the Folk: on Topophobia and the Horror of Rural Landscapes,” Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies in the Supernatural 5: (2020), Accessed December 2, 2022. Available from: https://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/ a-fear-of-the-folk-on-topophobia-and-the-horror-of-rural-landscapes/.   6. “Defining Rural Population”, Health Resources & Service Administration, last reviewed March 2022, https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/what-is-rural.   7. Scovell, Folk Horror, 8.   8. Scovell, Folk Horror, 8.   9. Scovell, Folk Horror, 15. 10. Scovell, Folk Horror, 17–19. 11. Thurgill, “Fear of the Folk”, online. 12. Scovell, Folk Horror, 7. 13. Cowdell is perhaps the exception that proves the rule; see Paul Cowdell, “‘Practicing Witchcraft Myself During the Filming’: Folk Horror, Folklore, and the Folkloresque,” Western Folklore (Vol. 78, No. 4, 2019), 295–326. 14. William John Thoms, quoted in Richard Bauman, “Folklore,” in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, edited by Richard Bauman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29. 15. Bauman, “Folklore,” 30. 16. Bauman, “Folklore,” 31. 17. Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore, Revised and Expanded Edition (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1996), 39. 18. Scovell, Folk Horror, 7. 19. See Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” in Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 57–62. 20. Bauman, “Folklore”, 31–2. 21. Wes Craven and Michael Banka, “Interview on Elm Street: An Interview with Wes Craven”, Cineaste (Vol. 17, No. 3, 1990), 25. 22. Craven and Banka, “Interview on Elm Street”, 23. 23. John Wooley, Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), 70. 24. The specific Christian denomination the Carters identify as is irrelevant; it merely establishes a normative level for audience identification. 25. As an interesting aside, it is worth noting that the American president at the time was the Democrat Jimmy Carter.

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26. I should not have to stress that “American Christian normativity” does not refer to any actual religious or spiritual practice as lived experience, but a kind of processed Christianity media texts advocate in their constructions of cultural norms. In other words, for the overly sensitive, #notallchristians. 27. “The American Religious Landscape in 2020,” Public Religion Research Institute, posted July 8, 2021. Accessed December 2, 2022. Available from: https://www.prri.org/ research/2020-census-of-american-religion/#page-section-1. 28. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center, posted May 12, 2015. Accessed December 2, 2022. Available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/ religion/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/. 29. In a personal correspondence with the Pew Research Center, they confirmed they did not have the statistical data to hand prior to their formation in 2004. 30. “Appendix B: Classification of Protestant Denominations”. Pew Research Centre, posted May 12, 2015. Accessed December 2, 2022. Available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/ religion/2015/05/12/appendix-b-classification-of-protestant-denominations/. 31. Neither the Pew Research Centre nor the Public Religion Research Institute make any distinctions between different denominations of Judaism (or Islam, or Buddhism). 32. Also planets. As Craven himself articulated in a 1985 interview with Christopher Sharrett, “Well, they were planetary names and absolutely primal. The family, Jupiter’s family, was absolutely outside the normal skein of earth societies. They represented bodies of great force, tremendous power” (Christopher Sharrett and Wes Craven, “‘Fairy Tales for the Apocalypse’: Wes Craven on the Horror Film”, Literature/Film Quarterly (Vol. 13, No. 3, 1985), 142–3. But the planets are named after the Roman gods, which Craven, as an educated man, must surely have known. 33. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology I, translated by John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1969). 34. Wooley, Wes Craven, 66–7. 35. See Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, “Sawney Bean, the Scottish Cannibal”, Folklore 108 (1997): 49–54. Also Blaine E. Pardoe, Sawney Bean: Dissecting the Legend of the Scottish Cannibal (Stroud: Fonthill, 2015). 36. The late Robert A. Burns was art director of both films. 37. John Kenneth Muir, quoted in Wooley, Wes Craven, 67–8. 38. Elliott Oring, “Folk Narratives”, in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, edited by Elliott Oring (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 1986), 125. 39. Craig Jackson, “The Grisly Deeds of Alexander Bean”, BBC Scotland (March 30, 2011). Accessed on December 2, 2022. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/ sawney_bean.shtml. 40. Hobbs and Cornwell, “Sawney Bean,” 52. 41. Gordon Pentland, “‘We Speak for the Ready’: Images of Scots in Political Prints, 1707–1832,” The Scottish Historical Review 90 (2011), 73. 42. Pentland, “‘We Speak for the Ready’,” 78–9. 43. Robin Wood, “Neglected Nightmares,” in Grant, ed., Robin Wood on the Horror Film, 190.

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4

“Why Are You Doing This!?” Flashbacks in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II Will Dodson

T

he Hills Have Eyes Part II has perhaps garnered more apologies than apologists since its release in 1985.1 Wes Craven distanced himself from the film for some years.2 Producer Peter Locke regretted not securing enough money for the director to properly complete the film.3 Actor Michael Berryman, in defense of Craven, noted that sometimes you just have to pay the bills.4 Some critics and scholars dismissed the film out of hand, and disparaged the film’s inclusion of extensive flashback footage from the original The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Particular criticism was reserved for the fact that one of the flashbacks was from the perspective of Beast the dog. For example, Mikita Brottman notes, “Part II is really little more than a pointless cash-in, with numerous flashbacks by characters replaying the events of the original film, and when Craven runs out of human survivors, even the surviving dog, Beast, is given a flashback of its very own.”5 Jennifer Brown adds: “In 1985 Wes Craven made a rather poor sequel to Hills, in which the dog is given a flashback.”6 Some crew members professed that the flashback footage in the final edit was a surprise to everyone at the first production screening, while others claimed that these were in the script from the start of shooting, a matter that will be addressed herein.7 The Hills Have Eyes Part II (from here on Hills II) may have been dismissed as a “bad” movie. However, this dismissal does not evaluate Hills II in terms of the film it is trying to be. Fundamentally, Hills II tentatively explores the long-term impacts of trauma, and in that sense, it shares much in common with Craven’s entire filmography. Hills II’s significance to Craven’s oeuvre, minor though it may be, comes in the way trauma and the (im)possibility of coping constitutes not only the film’s themes but also the structure of the narrative itself. In-keeping with Robin Wood’s analysis of horror, the film wrestles with the impossibility of “assimilating” Otherness—in this case represented

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both by the cannibal family of the original film, and even the motion picture sequel itself—and accepts, with some ambivalence, the necessity of “annihilating” it.8 Thinking of Hills II in this context points to how critical evaluation can begin to understand the film within Craven’s wider body of work. By 1982, Craven had pitched A Nightmare on Elm Street to several studios and had been rejected several times. The upstart New Line Cinema saw an opportunity with the project, but it took the company’s founder Robert Shaye two years to raise enough money to go into production. According to Craven, during that time he worked on about a dozen different treatments, and did rewrites and script doctoring, but he had no significant prospects since the disappointing experience of Swamp Thing (1982).9 Peter Locke and Barry Cahn, who produced the original The Hills Have Eyes, secured some money from British video distributors New Realm, and also from another independent label, VTC, who approached Craven about a sequel, which he began shooting in late 1983. Craven characterizes agreeing to make Hills II as purely a business decision. He said, “We had a budget of $1 million, which was really marginal, but it got me working again and I went right from that . . . Once you’re doing a film, there is a lot more heat around your name, so once people heard I was doing a sequel, we got the money to do A Nightmare on Elm Street, which obviously turned my career around.”10 Craven wrote the script, which he maintained was

Figure 4.1  Actress Janus Blythe (pictured) was one of the few original cast members to return for the sequel

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better than the movie turned out to be, inspired in part by some of the ideas he had for Nightmare.11 The story rechristens Ruby (Janus Blythe), the sympathetic cannibal of the original film, as Rachel, now both a romantic and business partner of Bobby (Robert Houston), one of the survivors of the original film’s terrorized Carter family. Rachel and Bobby run a Yamaha dealership and a racing team, which is about to demonstrate a new “super fuel” Bobby has developed. There is also to be a race that just so happens to be near the desert area that Ruby’s family used to terrorize. Craven and various actors and crew members have shared differing memories of the shooting script versus what made it to the screen. The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles holds a copy of the second draft of Craven’s script, dated July 29, 1983. While, unfortunately, it is not possible to compare the finished film to Craven’s first draft, it is possible to compare it to his second. A script-to-screen comparison not only provides a corrective to some conflicting accounts by Craven and his crew, but also grounds analysis of the film’s themes in the very flashback footage for which it has been derided. Hills II features four flashbacks, ranging in length from thirty seconds to a little over two minutes. In total, the film’s ninety-minute runtime incorporates only five minutes and thirteen seconds of footage from the original, all of which occurs in the first thirty-five minutes. The critical dismissal of the flashbacks as mere padding for the length exaggerates how much footage is used and neglects Craven’s creative choices in how they are deployed, especially since they function in ways that anticipate the dream-reality slippages of the then-gestating A Nightmare on Elm Street.12 The film recontextualizes its flashback footage in a therapy session and a panic attack for Bobby, a remembrance disturbing the sleep of Rachel/Ruby and, infamously, a triggered memory of Beast the dog.13 These daydreams—or “daymares”—offer a return of the repressed not hidden or “in disguise” as fantasy, but as harrowing, photorealistic memory.14 The script, entitled The Revenge of Jupiter: The Hills Have Eyes Part II, is in fact remarkably close to the finished sequel that made it into theaters, which suggests Craven’s claim that the footage had been taken out of his hands and edited without his input may have been exaggerated.15 The second draft indicates that several members of the motorcycle team (including two Black characters, rare for the slasher genre of the early 1980s) were due to meet grislier deaths, described in set pieces more intricate and complex than those that appear in the film. The most significant difference is that the finished film does not include a return of the cannibal patriarch Jupiter, but instead replaces him with his brother, dubbed “the Reaper” (John Bloom).16 He is joined by Rachel/Ruby’s brother, Pluto (Michael Berryman), whom Beast had apparently killed in the original Hills. None of the action scenes or dialogue change with the character, although one brief interaction with Rachel/Ruby takes on a

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Figure 4.2  Robert Houston (pictured) returns for a controversial opening sequence which provides extensive flashbacks to the original film

different tone, as will be discussed later. There is no available clarification as to why Jupiter was replaced. Perhaps James Whitworth, who played Jupiter in the original, was unavailable to reprise the role.17 Had this been the case then John Bloom, the seven-foot, four-inch exploitation veteran cast in his stead, may have simply looked too distinct from Whitmore to pass as Jupiter. Based on this script and the conflicting testimony in cast and crew interviews, it is impossible to know if Craven wrote the second draft to reflect drastic changes from an earlier vision he had for the film in light of budgetary constraints.18 What is clear is that the narrative structure and the use of flashbacks were planned prior to principal photography. All four flashbacks in the finished film appear exactly as written in the script. That plot includes logical signposts for the flashbacks and needs description in some detail to frame the ensuing discussion. Hills II opens with Bobby in therapy for his PTSD, and then shifts location to introduce the new characters fated for desert terror. Roy (Kevin Blair) and Harry (Peter Frechette) are the motocross racers, Hulk (John Laughlin) and Foster (Willard Pugh) are the mechanics, and Cass (Tamara Stafford), Jane (Colleen Riley), and Sue (Penny Johnson) are their respective girlfriends (Hulk is single but seems to have an unrequited interest in Rachel). The group meets up at the garage, where Cass is revealed to be blind and to possess some sort of psychic ability (this nods the sequel into the supernatural themes of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Deadly

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Friend [1986], and subsequent Craven projects). They load their motorcycles, cans of “Bobby Carter’s Special Formula II Super Racing Fuel,” and coolers of beer onto their school bus, and make a detour to pick up Beast. Beast, whose mate Beauty was killed in the original film, has been put to stud at a local dog breeder’s kennel to make extra money for the team’s entrance fee.19 The group drives on, and Rachel has a flashback as she naps on the bus that foreshadows the horrors ahead. Foster notices a reminder in a newspaper for daylight saving time, which the entire crew had forgotten. Realizing they will now be late for the race, they decide to take a shortcut through the desert. Before long, the bus kicks up a rock that punctures the gas tank, and limps along until they come upon an ostensibly abandoned miner’s camp, where they stop to look for gasoline. Instead, they find Pluto, which spurs Beast’s flashback. Pluto attacks Rachel and runs off, stealing a motorcycle along the way. Rachel reveals her past as Ruby and identifies Pluto as her brother. At this point, the experimental narrative structure driven by the flashback footage ends and the narrative switches to a more recognizable stalk-and-slash structure typical of Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) and its spin-offs and sequels. Roy and Harry, overconfident that their racing abilities enable them to do battle with one of the cannibals, give chase. The Reaper arrives, kills Harry, and deals Roy a massive head wound. The day wanes, and the remaining party split up. Rachel and Hulk leave to search for Roy and Harry—in the dark—while Foster and Sue sneak off for some (ill-placed) romance on the bus. They also unleash Beast, who runs off into the night. Cass and Jane remain in the camp, where they find some mine shafts. Jane inexplicably takes a shower, while Cass explores on her own. The Reaper kills each of the team in turn, while Beast finds a recovering Roy and kills Pluto, setting up a final clash between the Reaper and Cass.

“you

can’t sit on this for the rest of your life”: bobby

The film’s opening titles blend an atmospheric Harry Manfredini (Friday the 13th) score with flashback dialogue and sound from the original The Hills Have Eyes, mixed and altered over a panning shot of craggy hilltops at twilight. This introduction to the film represents Bobby recounting his dreams and memories. There are definite shades here of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and an interesting way of revisiting the original Hills via the “talking cure”—literally talking out the psychoanalytic aspects of a horror film in a sequel that revisits and revises that previous model to process and neuter the trauma. We hear Bobby’s psychiatrist ask, “Then what happened?” The camera cuts to an extreme closeup of the psychiatrist’s bespectacled eyes. “C’mon, don’t hang on it. Just get it

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out. [whispers] You can’t sit on this for the rest of your life.” Next the camera repositions for a shot-reverse-shot of the two in tight close-up, framing both characters’ full faces. Billy recounts the story of his father, mother, and older sister being killed, his niece being kidnapped, and how he and Brenda set a trap using their mother’s dead body as bait for Jupiter. This narration introduces the first flashback, a scene of Jupiter examining the mother’s body, and then chasing Bobby and Brenda into the family camper. The siblings, who had filled the camper with propane gas, escape through the window and trap the door so that when the monster enters, it will explode. The camper does explode, but Jupiter avoids the trap and grabs Bobby. Brenda chops him with an ax, and after Bobby wrestles free, he picks up his pistol and shoots Jupiter, leading to the character’s death. The flashback ends, and the psychiatrist remarks, “So he’s dead, all right?” Bobby seems unsure, and the psychiatrist, a little impatiently, continues, “What does it take to convince you? . . . . . He was a stupid psychopath, you were able to trick him and kill him, and you did. They all were! They were all beatable, you did it! You know it!” He encourages Bobby to go to the race, and says it makes good business sense. This odd comment yokes Bobby’s mental health to his entrepreneurism (a comment on Craven himself feeling obliged to make this sequel?). Bobby leaves, still reluctant. Later, when the team gathers at the garage, Bobby has a second, short flashback that represents a panic attack. He briefly remembers coming to the camper and finding Brenda, who is screaming after having been raped by Mars (Lance Gordon). The flashback ends and Bobby tells the team he cannot go with them. The psychiatrist’s ineffective push for Bobby to “get over it” cannot help him cope with the irrecuperable. Robin Wood situates Craven within a discussion of modern horror’s turn to the family, “reflected in its steady geographical progress toward America.”20 Evil, consequently, was no longer foreign in location or birth but domestic, coming from within. The original Hills film pit the Carter family against Jupiter’s clan of cannibals. The sequel dwells at length in its first act not on an external threat but an internal one: the aftermath’s impact on the survivors. Bobby’s anguished memories foreground Brenda, his twin sister, who was terrorized and raped, and who witnessed the abduction of their infant niece and the murders of their older sister, Lynne (Dee Wallace), and their mother. While the therapist focuses on Bobby’s fear of Jupiter’s clan, he does not address the feelings of guilt, remorse, or anger that Bobby feels about Brenda. Where is she now? Is she alive? Does she still speak to Bobby? Bobby’s inarticulate speech does not answer any of these questions, and so the audience is left to infer the family could not recover and rebuild. Broken families are the source of much of the horror in Craven’s work, as Wood also acknowledges. When Bobby finally succumbs to his anxiety and is unable to travel with the team, he is effectively cut out of the rest of the film. But nonetheless his fear

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drives it, in contrast with their clueless bravado, even as they get slaughtered, one by one. The opening title sequence and Bobby’s therapy session arguably are the most powerful and intense of the film, and that tension lingers throughout at least its first half.

“do

y o u t h i n k y o u w o u l d pa s s ?”: r a c h e l / ru b y

Rachel’s story is potentially the most interesting, and it is curious that Craven did not explore her trauma more thoroughly in the screenplay. When Rachel takes over leading the team for Bobby, her memories dovetail with his. Her flashback occurs on the bus as she dozes while Harry narrates to the team the local legend of Jupiter, “where the sand ran with fire and blood, and the hills had eyes.” He recounts the story of the original Hills, naming Pluto and Mars, and concludes, “there was a daughter, yeah, she killed her brother to save the tourists.” Rachel has a nightmarish memory of saving Katy, the Carter family’s baby, from butchering, and of sinking a rattlesnake’s fangs into her brother’s neck during the climax to the original story. While Bobby thinks of Brenda, Rachel’s distress is over the other two survivors. What happened to Doug and Katy? As with Brenda, would Doug and Katy still communicate with Bobby and Rachel? Can Doug forgive Rachel for her role in the slaughter? Can he accept her relationship with Bobby? Rachel’s life as Ruby had to have been brutal and violent. She is about the same age as Bobby, which means she spent close to twenty years living with her family, participating in cannibalism, and wrestling with her familial bonds and her desire to leave. She is a “next generation” of trauma, having been abused by her parents, the preceding generation. In the opening scene of the original Hills, Grandpa Fred (John Steadman) catches her sneaking around his driedup gas station. She tells him she wants to get out, and the old codger wheezes a laugh. “Do you think you would pass?” he chortles. Clearly Ruby has worked for the past eight years to do just that. She shed her old name, bonded with Bobby, and opened a small business. From a certain angle, hers is an immigrant story, the American Dream come true. Yet her past haunts her, not only in her own memories, but in the mythologized “scary story” told by teenagers. She was a cannibal, a desert mutant. Is she still? Questions of Rachel’s assimilation are left tantalizingly unexplored. It is doubly unfortunate that the script does not allow her any but the most cursory interaction with Pluto or the Reaper. Rachel does not get the opportunity to confront her remaining family, nor to struggle with any of these questions beyond the complicated implications of her flashback. The screenplay gives her one significant character beat. As Rachel runs back towards the camp, she hears Jupiter whispering, “Ruuuubeeeee, gonna get you, girl!” She stops short,

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and says, tentatively, “Papa Jupe?” The screenplay kills her off suddenly: she steps into a pit trap and impales herself upon a stake.21 The film dispenses with that brief familial moment, and instead Reaper knocks her to the ground, where she splits her head open on a rock. Actress Janus Blythe refuses to this day to accept that her character dies in the film: “This is not my ego talking, but for the character, she doesn’t die,” she says. “You can’t have Ruby die! . . . So when it came to me hitting my head on the rock, [Craven] said to gurgle and all that stuff and die, I wouldn’t do it. Notice that in the movie I just kind of pass out. I wouldn’t die!”22 Blythe intuits her character’s resonance, and the significance of an ambiguous future for her. Could she have passed, or would she have been unable to repress the monstrousness of her past life? The question of whether she could build a “family,” nuclear or extended, with Bobby and their racing team, is abruptly rendered moot.

“he’s quite a specimen, own, too”: beast

and has a mind of his

Beast’s flashback is the most remembered, and most ridiculed, feature of Hills II. Craven was candid about it later in his career. In a 2005 interview with Fangoria, the magazine’s editor Tony Timpone asked, “the dog that has a flashback [in Hills II]. What were you thinking?” Craven acknowledged that padding the runtime was part of his motivation: The reason is, you can’t do that—look stupid—and I guess it was, but it’s still the only dog flashback that I know of in cinema! We didn’t have money to shoot enough to fill ninety minutes of film, so that would give me another five minutes by showing that sequence for the first film. Okay, so I just thought, “Let’s do it. Screw it.” Sometimes it—that— works, sometimes people end up just thinking you’re stupid for the next thirty years.23 Perhaps there is little to say in defense of the “dog flashback,” but the choice of footage and timing of the triggered memory is in-keeping with Craven’s deployment of the flashbacks as traumatic memories erupting in the present.24 In that sense, perhaps it does “work.” Beast has the final flashback of the film, and “remembers” his fight-to-the(seeming)-death with Pluto eight years earlier after he catches the cannibal’s scent in the mining camp. He gets agitated, and whines and scratches at the door of the school bus, trying to get out. We do not know exactly how dogs experience memories, though presumably it is nothing like remembering a scene from a movie. Beast is in a sort of liminal space; as a domesticated animal

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he is part of the family, but as an animal—appropriately named—he is a bestial Other who can erupt into instinctual violence. In giving a moment in the film over to Beast’s memories, Craven reminds the audience that such eruptions also occur among Carters and cannibals alike, recalling The Last House on the Left (1972) and anticipating Nightmare. Beast’s flashback as written hews to those of Bobby and Rachel. Pluto sniffs the air in the original footage, mirroring Beast’s sniffing in Hills II in order to stimulate his memory. Beast re-lives the moment of violence and pain that his body remembers most vividly, and he trembles and barks in reaction to it. Like Bobby and Rachel, he struggles with a lingering pain and anguish with which he has trouble coping. Beast does achieve a sort of closure, as he does eventually knock Pluto off a cliff, killing him, and goes on to survive himself. Ironically, this “closure” means that Beast is the only character to confront and reconcile with his trauma. In itself, this is perhaps a subtle acknowledgement of the dark, often ironic, humor that Craven would later bring to films such as Shocker (1989) and the Scream series.

“reaper don’t get fooled oh no!”: genre trauma

l i k e pa pa j u p e ,

Whatever Craven’s intentions may have been, Hills II nevertheless compartmentalizes the trauma of the first film into well-defined, comfortable generic boundaries. The film’s narrative and structure revisit sites and spaces of trauma, and offer moments of experimental possibilities in the flashbacks, but the film does not, as mentioned, always fully pursue these implications. The flashbacks all occur in the first act, after which Rachel and Beast have marginal screen time in favor of the young motorcycle team. The remaining fifty-five minutes form a generic slasher film, beat by beat. This conventional structure denatures and recuperates the more radical form of the original Hills. The original, like Craven’s preceding Last House, drew its horror from domestic spaces—in this case, the middle-class family vacation. As Caetlin Benson-Allot puts it, The Hills Have Eyes: scandalously borrows the surname of sitting US president Jimmy Carter to depict the clash between the “white bread” Carter family and a tribe of cannibals they encounter in the Nevada desert. Through these groups, Craven stages a conflict between the civilized vision the United States holds of itself and the brutal frontier mentality behind American exceptionalism, yet he never guides the spectator to side with one clan or the other: both behave deplorably. In the film’s final shot, the camera watches from a cannibal’s point of view as the most cultured of the

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Carter family, son-in-law Doug Wood . . . stabs the cannibal to death, then collapses in exhaustion and disgust. The shot freezes on Wood’s face, emphasizing that his Pyrrhic victory cost him his principles and leaving the viewer to question her own presumed civility.25 As abhorrent as Jupiter’s clan is, their status as societal rejects positions them in a parody of materialist and even neocolonialist values as they scavenge, stake and expand into territory, and consume human flesh. They are rapists and cannibals, yes. But, as Robin Wood put it in his analysis of Last House and Hills, “the gang’s monstrousness is the product of the inequalities and power structures of a class system into which all the characters are bound.”26 The blowhard patriarch Big Bob Carter (Russ Grieve), who drags his family in gas guzzling cars across the desert to view a silver mine he inherited, in absentia, unwittingly forces the confrontation. As Wood puts it, “The domination of the family by the father, the domination of the nation by the bourgeois class and its norms, the domination of other nations and other ideologies, more precisely, attempts at domination that inevitably fail and turn to mutual destruction— the structures interlock, are basically a single structure.”27 The traumatic viewing experience of the first film is undoubtedly due to such “dominations” and the sequel relates this back in the form of communal trauma, not dissimilar, one could argue, to the returning veteran from the Vietnam “nightmare” Craven was seen to have channeled in his early work. However, the patriarchal and conservative nuclear family is absent in Hills II and so is much of its thematic resonance, although the team members’ oblivious entitlement and loud, reckless motorcycling might recall something of the Carter clan’s unchecked sense of freedom to roam.28 Instead, we have the intimated but unseen relationship between Bobby and Rachel, and the casual romances of the bike team. There are no “adults” guiding them and so they freely make decisions that leave them vulnerable, a staple of the slasher genre. Remarkably, the characters do not seem to worry about the danger they are in. Even Cass, whom the film emphasizes has some psychic ability, on several occasions tells characters that there’s “nothing to worry about” even as their numbers dwindle. There is a sense that Hills II is a kind of odd, refracted mirror-image of the prior film, revisiting the franchise’s older sites to rehash the trauma with characters taking on slightly mirror-image versions of themselves, with new names and new relationships. The motorcycle team is made up of shallow, obnoxious characters with social but not familial bonds with one another. They ignore every portent of doom, and even seem unconcerned about missing the race once their bus breaks down. The plot takes the characters through every cliché known to the slasher genre (showers, separations, seductions) and this aspect has not gone overlooked, even by ardent Craven enthusiasts. John

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Kenneth Muir observes that Hills II includes “typical ‘stalking’ point-of-view subjective shots, practical jokes played by teens pretending to be the ‘real’ killer, and even a hackneyed scene in which the survivor [. . .] uncovers the den of the villain and finds the corpses of all her friends.”29 The Reaper, moreover, does not bring the gravitas that the returned patriarch of Jupiter might have. Reaper simply appears here and there, crisscrossing the film’s geography, and easily kills each member of the team individually until only Cass and Roy remain. He has minimal characterization, vulnerability, or nuance, and seems to appear as needed to keep the proceedings moving. Cass at first seems like she will be a significant character, but she is less developed than other Craven heroines. There is some irony of a blind woman with clairvoyance in a film called The Hills Have Eyes Part II, which might underscore the mythological “Cassandra” as her namesake. However, the screenplay does not reveal much more of her character other than what appears on screen, save for one instance. The mining camp is lit by electric lamps at night. In the script, Cass hides from the Reaper in a utility shack and hears the engine of the generator. When the Reaper opens the door, brandishing a spear (Cass knows he holds a spear because the Reaper throws it at her earlier and misses), the heroine taunts him, shouting “Do anything to me—But please—don’t throw that spear at me again—I can’t stand the thought of being PENETRATED!” He hurls the spear, which Cass dodges, and destroys the generator, plunging the two of them into darkness and giving Cass an advantage.30 This scene does not, unfortunately, appear in the finished film: it gives

Figure 4.3  A new younger cast headlined the sequel, led by actress Tamara Stafford (pictured, middle) as Cass

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Cass not only (verbal) control over her own body but shows her to be cunning and intuitive, not unlike later Craven heroines such as Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street and Sidney (Neve Campbell) in Scream (1996). In the film itself, however, Roy reappears and rescues Cass, and the two recreate Bobby and Brenda’s trap for Jupiter in the original film. This déjà vu brings Bobby’s trauma forward, and recontextualizes it as conventional action spectacle. This time, Roy uses Bobby’s super fuel for a much larger explosion than that of the original film, and for good measure ties a weight around the Reaper to pull him down the mine shaft as he burns. Beast returns, and the trio limp off into the breaking dawn. Cass is strong, resourceful, defiant, and (unlike many “final girls”) sexually active—she has an off-screen romantic encounter with Roy in the first act—some of the qualities that will also characterize Craven heroines to come, particularly Sidney in the original Scream. Still, it is difficult not to think of Cass as a missed opportunity, especially when Roy returns to save her. A happy ending, yes, and something of a restoration of the domestic order that Craven would frequently work against: a man, his girl, and a dog. In drawing connections between flashbacks as a cinematic trope to express dreams and nightmares, Hills II announces itself in its first act as something of a resonating reiteration of aspects of the prior film, without becoming a fully fleshed-out character study or narrative exploration of trauma. For whatever reason, there seems to be a tentativeness in terms of revisiting sites of trauma, and the film bundles those issues away by shifting to a more straightforward generic exercise in the latter acts. Craven would explore trauma more explicitly and successfully in the decades to come, in franchises such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, 1987, 1994)31 and Scream (1996– 2011), and smaller-scale exercises like The People Under the Stairs (1991) and My Soul to Take (2010). Craven’s career took off during the production of Hills II, as he had hoped it would. He took an offer to direct the television film Invitation From Hell (1984) during the sound mixing of Hills II.32 Pre-production on A Nightmare on Elm Street began around the same time, and Craven was revising its script even as he worked on the other two films. As he put it, “I wasn’t sleeping much, but it was a very ecstatic kind of energy, after not having worked for so long, to be doing three pictures back-to-back.”33 Regardless of Craven’s stated financial rather than artistic motivations to make the film, The Hills Have Eyes Part II is not an outlier in his filmography. On the contrary, the film inventively deploys its flashback footage, and makes some key tweaks to the slasher formula. In the end, Hills II should be remembered as a minor but key project in Craven’s body of work that features interesting experiments of flashback footage as daydreams, consistent with Craven’s lifelong obsession with trauma and recuperation. It deserves its own second chance.

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notes   1. It was completed and released in some European markets in 1984, but the US release date was August 2, 1985.   2. Craven remarked in one interview, “I’m sorry about The Hills Have Eyes Part II. The reason I did that film was that I was dead broke and needed to do any film. I would have done Godzilla Goes to Paris.” Brian J. Robb, Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998), 56. The editor of this book, however, relates that during his last meeting with Craven he asked the director to sign his copy of Hills II and was told by the director, “There’s some good stuff in there.”   3. In a retrospective interview conducted around 2019, Locke said, “I wanted to support [the film]. But it was a terrible way to support it, because . . . if you can’t get enough money to make something decent, then you’re kind of stuck in the middle.” Quoted in Michael Felsher, prod., Blood, Sand and Fire: The Making of “The Hills Have Eyes Part II,” Arrow Films, 2019.   4. “[Wes] was very excited about Swamp Thing . . . but audiences can be fickle and it just didn’t take off. Sometimes you just have to wait, but we have to pay the bills in between. I really think that’s where Wes was at.” (Ibid.)   5. Brottman, Mikita, Meat Is Murder: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture (New York: Creation Books, 1997), 109.   6. Brown, Jennifer, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013), 131.   7. As a representative example, Unit Production Manager and First Assistant Director John Callas recalled, “As far as what was going to come from The Hills Have Eyes Part 1 into The Hills Have Eyes Part II, it was pretty much locked into the script when I got it.” Conversely, Production Designer Dominick Bruno claimed “None of us knew those flashbacks were going to be in the picture. The script didn’t show that.” Quoted in Felsher, Blood, Sand and Fire.   8. Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Robin Wood, Richard Lippe, and Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 77.   9. A blurb in the Hollywood Reporter dated 26 October 1983 announced that Overseas Film Group, a company owned by Robert Little and Michel Freudenstein, would go into production on a film called The Innocents, directed by Wes Craven and produced by Christopher Manckiewicz. Principal photography was scheduled between October and March 1984. The Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections Unrealized Scripts Collection has the Hollywood Reporter notice and the screenplay, written by Craven based on an original script by Manckiewicz. The Innocents is something of a sexploitation riff on Lord of the Flies, in which an all-girl choral group on a world tour crash-lands on an island in the South Pacific. The script features several elements that could be identified with Craven’s style, including clashes between a faction of girls who dictate a Puritanical moral discipline and another who prefer more liberalism, along with intense dream sequences, booby traps as a key plot device, and so on. It is reasonable to assume that The Innocents is an example of the treatment work and script doctoring that Craven was doing in the interim between Swamp Thing and Hills II. 10. Robb, Screams and Nightmares, 54. According to the Internet Movie Database, the budget was an estimated $700,000. 11. “It was a much better script, I think, than the movie turned out to be . . . It was an important film for me to do, just to get the momentum going again, but it was very underfunded.” If Craven elaborated on the specific ideas in Nightmare that inspired parts of Hills II, they were not recorded. Quoted in Robb, Screams and Nightmares, 54.

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12. To be fair, adding to the runtime does seem to have been part of the calculus. Peter Locke recalled that the reason for the flashbacks “must have been financial . . . he must have known when we ran out of money that he could edit it together by taking, by cannibalizing—ha, ha—the first movie about cannibals and putting it in the second movie.” Quoted in Felsher, Blood, Sand and Fire (special features, The Hills Have Eyes Part II, Arrow Video). 13. First Assistant Director John Callas remembers being asked to shoot some second unit material, and upon being handed a section of the script, he said “A doggy flashback? Wes, really?” Quoted in Ibid. 14. Wood, “An Introduction,” 2018, 82. 15. In an interview with Kim Newman, Craven said “It was not intended to be released as it was . . . The whole thing is unfinished.” Quoted in John Wooley, Wes Craven: The Man and his Nightmares (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), 93. 16. The Reaper is unmentioned in the original film. In fact, when Grandpa Fred, Jupiter’s father, relates the feral family’s history in the first Hills, he only describes Jupiter and an older sister, whom Jupiter had burned alive. 17. Whitworth’s final acting credit is a two-part episode of B.J. and the Bear in 1981. 18. Craven did claim that the budget of the film was based upon his first draft, and that his second draft was “much better and bigger . . . but the budget stayed the same. It was a real nightmare to shoot.” The fact that the second draft and the finished film are essentially the same, minus more ostentatious death scenes, supports the case that the second draft was the film Craven intended to make, and that he did more or less make that film. Quoted in Robb, 54–5. 19. The indignity! 20. Wood, “An Introduction,” 2018, 92. 21. Wes Craven, The Revenge of Jupiter: The Hills Have Eyes Part II, Draft Two, July 29, 1983. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. Accessed May 20, 2022. 22. Quoted in Felsher, Blood, Sand and Fire. 2019. Blythe continues, noting that there was not much room for Rachel/Ruby, “I wasn’t really happy with all the characters he put in there, you know, the motorcycles, and the blind girl, and you know, it just seemed too much!” 23. Shannon Blake Skelton, ed., Wes Craven: Interviews (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2019), 125. 24. There is at least one impassioned defender of Beast’s flashback. In an essay accompanying Arrow Video’s Blu-ray edition of the film, Amanda Reyes writes, “Yes, Beast the dog has a flashback. That’s become a major sticking point for most of the naysayers. But, where’s the protest for the canine’s equally ridiculous flashback in Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (a.k.a. Dracula’s Dog, 1979)? Are we going to start flipping out over the dog flashback in the 1946 Russian produced adaptation of Jack London’s White Fang? And, do we disown the adorable Benji for his flashback in his 1974 film? Yeah, I didn’t think so.” “The Hills Have Heart” (Arrow Films, 2019), 8. In addition, there are many horror films—Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983) comes to mind—–in which animals mirror human violence as a result of their embodied trauma. 25. Benson-Allott, Caetlin, “Wes Craven: Thinking Through Horror,” Film Quarterly (Vol. 69, No. 2, Winter 2015), 75. 26. Wood, “Neglected Nightmares,” in Grant, ed., Robin Wood on the Horror Film, 190. 27. Ibid. 28. And the film never offers a clue, but audiences may wonder if the mining camp is connected to the silver mine the Carter family had inherited in the original. 29. Muir, John Kenneth, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 102. 30. Craven, Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

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31. Craven’s involvement in the franchise included writer-director of the original, screenwriter of Dream Warriors (1987), and writer-director of New Nightmare (1994). 32. First broadcast on May 24, 1984. Craven was hired to direct the film during post-production on Hills II. 33. Robb, 1998, 57.

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part ii

Freddy Krueger and Beyond

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chapter

5

The American Nightmare Continued: Individualism, Feminism, and Freddy Krueger Sinead Edmonds

I

t is difficult to discuss the work of Wes Craven without acknowledging the wider American socio-political context as a central thematic concern of his stories, spanning across multiple decades and films. The integral role of horror to the expression of social and political commentary in cinema was perhaps most famously expressed by the late Robin Wood in his concept of “The American Nightmare.”1 Wood’s conceptualization of the American nightmare as the “return of the repressed” argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the American horror film offered an avenue for expression of that which was repressed within society.2 Wood connected the horror films of this period directly to the concurrent issues in American society, such as the Vietnam War and the fallout over Watergate. The author would view later horror films, of the 1980s, as representing the failure of the revolutionary potential of the genre a decade earlier, mentioning how an “astonishingly abrupt shift” saw “the progressive, exploratory, often radical late 1960s–70s” turn into “the reactionary and repressive [. . .] Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger—they did not develop out of the characteristic monsters of the 1970s, but represent a refusal of everything embodied earlier.”3 Thus, this chapter aims to address Wood’s assertation that the later work of filmmakers such as Wes Craven, specifically the Freddy Krueger figure, no longer represents The American Nightmare. Indeed, I will argue that A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984—from herein Nightmare) can be seen as a “progressive” and even “radical” expression of the social and political context of American society of the time, as expressed through personal experience, particularly that represented by Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson character. I propose that although Nancy’s “active resistance” to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has been described as a feminist formulation of the “final girl”,4 it more specifically expresses the rampant individualism and dissolution of social structures such as

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Figure 5.1  Family conflict (pictured are John Saxon and his onscreen daughter, played by Heather Langenkamp) is central to A Nightmare on Elm Street

the family in 1980s America, directly relating to the popular Reaganite ideology of the time. However, rather than rejecting the presence of feminist ideology in Nightmare altogether, I propose alternative expressions of feminist thought within the film text. While the film has been followed by several sequels, and even a remake, this analysis will consider solely the original 1984 film directed and written by Wes Craven.5 Wood’s praise of 1960s and 1970s horror and criticism of the genre during the 1980s has a direct relationship to his analysis of the work of Wes Craven.6 In his evaluation of The Last House on the Left, Wood spoke about the power of the film in relation to the depiction of the unspoken violence in American culture at the time, potentially in reference to the Vietnam War, in that “it analyzes the nature and conditions of violence and sees them as inherent in the American situation [. . .] No act of violence in the film is condoned, yet we are led to understand every act as the realization of potentials that exist within us all, that are intrinsic to our social and personal relationships.”7 Wood’s assessment of the strength of The Last House on the Left assesses the impact of the ambiguous depiction of the “Other” or the monster in the horror film within the 1960s and 1970s context. Through the depiction of the often-unacknowledged violence that American society might be seen to have been built upon (from settler-genocide to war and slavery), the film epitomizes the return of the repressed, in that it brings what is latent in the specific social context in question to the forefront by confronting audiences with its depiction, denying them the ability to look away. This broad idea regarding what American society ignores eventually returning to destroy the

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beneficiaries is a running theme throughout Craven’s work, particularly his Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994). The sharp distinction drawn by Wood between the horror of the 1970s and that of the 1980s is perhaps emblemized by his critical view of the difference between The Last House on the Left and Nightmare. While Wood recognizes the importance of The Last House on the Left, he is openly disdainful about Craven’s subsequent work: “Wes Craven’s career has achieved a certain consistency, in that each of his films since Last House on the Left has been worse than the one before.”8 Wood’s assessment of Craven’s later work is consistent with his disdain for the horror movies of the 1980s, directing particular ire at the slasher genre, which he derisory references as “When a Stranger Calls after Night School on Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth, Don’t Answer the Phone and Don’t go Into the House because He Knows You’re Alone and is Dressed to Kill.”9 Wood’s dismissal of horror films during this period focuses on what he sees as the punitive relationship between sexuality and violence, describing films such as Nightmare as “teenagers endlessly punished for having sex.”10 Whereas he views the period associated with the conceptualization of the American Nightmare as imbued with revolutionary potential, expressed through genre and representing a rejection of societal constraints, Wood views the cinema of the 1980s as representing a reinforcement of such structures (heteronormativity, class structure, the family unit). He even argues that if “one approaches the American horror film from a radical perspective one must inevitably find great positive interest in the achievements of the late 1960s–70s and reject almost everything that has followed.”11 The distinction Wood draws is clear and he applies it specifically to Craven’s work, seeing not just a lack of quality in the director’s output during this new decade, but a shift in meaning and value in relation to the exploration of social issues that typified his analysis of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). While the work of Craven remains relatively under-explored within an academic context, particularly in light of his influence on the horror genre, Wood’s view of the filmmaker’s later work by no means represents a consensus. Later works such as Scream have been praised for an innovative and influential “hyper postmodernist” approach to the slasher film.12 Also, although criticized by Wood, Nightmare has been the subject of some scholarly texts as well. Existing literature has focused on issues as diverse as the film as an expression of the contemporary Gothic,13 its relation to psychoanalytic theory,14 and the relationship between cinema and dreams.15 Further, Jeffrey Podoshen discusses the depiction of the home as a shared concern informed by social context in both The Last House on the Left and Nightmare, pointing to the setting of the latter as seeming “to come right out of a Reagan campaign advertisement like the famous ‘It’s Morning Again in America.’”16 There is a particular focus within existing literature on Nightmare related to the depiction of Langenkamp’s Nancy as a formative “Final Girl.”17

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Theorizing in her influential monograph, Men, Women and Chain Saws, Carol J. Clover describes the final girl as “the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends, perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified.”18 James Kendrick argues that Nancy’s rejection of violence during the climax of Nightmare relates directly to Craven’s own views on the futility of such actions.19 Kyle Christensen outlines the ambivalent relationship between the concept of the final girl and feminism, concluding that Nancy represents a stronger, more feminist final girl than the example of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), an assertation I will return to later in this chapter.20 In order to illuminate Wood’s distinction between the merits of the depiction of social and political issues within the horror of the 1970s and 1980s, it is important to understand the cultural context of both periods in relation to Wood’s American Nightmare. While Wood has made clear what he views as the cultural surroundings which informed horror in the 1970s, his rejection of the 1980s horror film means that he has not outlined a similar context in the latter decade. Some of the social issues facing American society had certainly changed since the 1970s, for instance the AIDS crisis and the beginning of a homelessness problem, but in many ways the decade represented a continuation of problems from what had come before. For example, the dissolution of the nuclear family continued into the decade, with the 1981 peak in divorce rates in the US.21 This was particularly pertinent in relation to women’s rights, especially considering the failure to pass the 1982 equal rights amendment, which aimed to enshrine feminist gains in law, and the continuation of litigation relating to the 1973 Roe vs Wade abortion rights ruling. In political terms, within the US, the presidency of Ronald Reagan almost entirely dominated the decade, beginning with his election in 1980 and the end of his second term in 1989. Reaganism defined the decade in relation to American governmental policy, perhaps largely cemented by his economic policy, often referred to as “Reaganomics.” As argued by James Midgley, individualism was a key ideological underpinning of the economic philosophies underpinning Reaganism.22 Other Reaganite policies included advocacy for a reduction in the role and size of the state, emphasizing in his inaugural address that he intended to “curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment [. . .] All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.”23 Reagan as a figure was, it goes without saying, emblematic of so-called Reaganomics and Reaganism, with his personal image described as “an attempt to conceal the collective basis of capitalism [. . .] beneath a veneer of individualistic selfassertion.”24 If the contrast between the end of the idealism of the 60s and the headline issues of the 70s (Vietnam, Watergate) was a thematic concern of

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Craven’s work, especially evident in The Last House on the Left, the Reagan era was perhaps a further avenue for an even greater contrast to be explored. The failure of the revolution of the 60s (which saw protesters famously chanting Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh at anti-Vietnam War gatherings) was even more apparent from this perspective in time, and there was now a further generational aspect to be explored. Released in 1984, Nightmare largely adheres to the formal structure of the slasher film, while simultaneously exploring an innovative narrative where the killer stalks his victims in their dreams. An important thematic concern in the film is the disruption of the nuclear family, specifically in the setting of the suburban home. This is a theme that has repeatedly been the focus of Craven’s work, from the murderous vengeance of the Collingwood family in The Last House on the Left to the circumstances motivating the killer(s) in the original Scream. As emphasized by Wood’s own praise of The Last House on the Left, these thematic concerns do not preclude Nightmare from being discussed in relation to the American Nightmare. An important element of Nightmare in relation to such thematic concerns is the distinctly American aesthetic of the film. The film’s setting visually places itself within 1980s suburbia. While Halloween perhaps epitomizes the privileged white suburban setting in the slasher (and is also based in the Midwest), the juxtaposition of contemporary suburbia and violence has been a constant element of Craven’s work, from The Last House on the Left to My Soul to Take (2010).25 Craven’s regular use of the suburban setting often relates to recurring thematic concerns in his work of the American middle-class family and what they might be hiding behind the respectable veneer (for example: Deadly Friend [1986], The People Under the Stairs [1991], Cursed [2005]). With Nightmare we can see a continuation of this narrative. While the suburbia pictured here is an important element of the motion picture, there is another layer, highlighting the distinctly American nature of the world depicted within the film. Throughout the text, there are elements of the mise-en-scène that speak to generic replications of Americana, often distorted, which are not the focus of the shot, but an unsettling underscore. For example, in Glen’s bedroom (the character is played by a prefame Johnny Depp), seemingly disparate elements of the set include a stuffed turkey evoking Thanksgiving tradition, a cutout of the Statue of Liberty pinned above his bed, and what appears to be an American flag, partially obscured by abstract imagery. The Star-Spangled Banner even precedes his death at the hands of Krueger.26 Glen’s bedroom becomes the scene of his demise, in a moment of surreal violence where he is consumed by his bed (the ultimate comfort of the suburban home), as a fountain of blood shoots up towards the ceiling. The distinctly American elements of the mise-en-scène, combined with this gruesome imagery, results in a notable juxtaposition between violence (from outside) and the distorted but patriotic imagery of the surroundings.

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The dissolution of the nuclear family and the anxieties raised by such, within a suburban context, is thus clear and evident in Nightmare. The film primarily follows Nancy’s perspective, providing a relatively deep insight into her family and her home, exploring her experience as a child of a divorced family. However, prior to Nancy’s introduction, the film focuses on the character of Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss). She is the first character killed by Krueger and introduces the themes of the broken nuclear family and the latent, inherent, often silent violence of the suburban context. The depiction of Tina, and her relation to the narrative and thematic content of the film, is perhaps exemplified by the opening scene of the film. Craven depicts Tina’s dream, and Freddy Krueger’s pursuit of her in this dream world, within which the film text draws a clear distinction with the waking world. The physical depiction of Tina speaks to her assumed innocence and youth; she is clearly a teenager (presumably in her last year at high school) and is dressed in a virginal white nightdress. This connotation is further emphasized by the lamb present in her dream, not just a symbol of youth and innocence, but one associated with victimization and violence, as exemplified by the popular idiom “like a lamb to the slaughter.” The status of this scene as a dream is emphasized through disorienting camera angles and the ethereal but sinister score, but when Tina is attacked by Krueger in a jump-scare, we, as an audience, are brought back to the waking world with a jolt. Tina is startled, rousing her mother (Donna Woodrum), whose introduction as a remarkably uninterested parent reveals the dysfunction and profoundly damaged state of Tina’s family unit. It is here that a recurring motif of Nightmare is introduced: that of parents being either unable or unwilling to help and provide support to their children as a symptom of the individualism inherent in the Reaganist 1980s American context. While the physical manifestation of Tina’s dream within the waking world becomes evident through the symbolic shredding of her white nightgown, the advice offered by Tina’s mother, “you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreaming,” is simultaneously ineffective and impossible, being that it is clear the damage is not the result of the former. Furthermore, it is not realistically possible to control your dreams (although this becomes a central plot point of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors [Chuck Russell, 1987], which Craven would assist in writing). The dysfunction of the family unit is further emphasized through the appearance of Tina’s mother’s boyfriend, who appears only to ask the divorcee if she is planning to return to the “sack or what?” It is evident here that this is not a family unit that offers support to Tina. As the scene ends, she removes the crucifix on her wall that has been present in the background of the shot, and holds it to her chest, perhaps signifying the traditional values and institution of the Church held in such esteem by American conservative thought. The symbolism of the crucifix is also represented in the children’s nursery rhyme about Freddy, which urges

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Figure 5.2  Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger became a horror film icon in the 1980s

the listener to “grab your crucifix.” However, as we see the fear on Tina’s face, cast in shadow, it is evident that it does not offer a great deal of comfort to her. While the scene takes place within the suburban family unit, Tina’s mother is uninterested in her wellbeing, and dismisses her, foregrounding not only her individualistic self-interest but the visible dissolution of the family unit. Further thematic presence of the dissolution of the American family arrives with Tina’s death. The violence is foreshadowed through dialogue between Tina and Rod (Nick Corri) as she forcefully rebuffs him with, “Up yours with a twirling lawnmower.” While this dialogue also hints at the presence of violence in Tina’s life prior to her death at the hands of Freddy Krueger, it is a device that has also been used in Craven’s prior work. In The Last House on the Left, prior to her fatal encounter with the Krug gang, Mari uses an unusually violent metaphor when speaking to her father, threatening to “get some sandpaper” to curtail her breasts when her father asks if she is wearing a bra—pointing to how, in Craven’s work, even a subtle, passive violence manifests itself in the everyday lives of American households. Tina’s death takes place in her home, absent of a parental presence, but in the company of Rod, Nancy, and Glen. In this scenario Nancy and Glen act as parental figures in an approximated family unit similar to that depicted in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). This situation also meets with a similarly tragic end, as neither Nancy nor Glen save or help Tina any more than her mother could. Part of the terror enacted by Freddy Krueger is that through his manifestations in his victim’s own personal dream world, the experience is totally individualized, in that no external help or assistance can reach through unless the victim wakes up— something only they themselves can do. This is further emphasized visually as

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we witness Tina’s death at the hands of Freddy from Rod’s perspective, as he expresses both helplessness and terror at her spinning, bleeding body. In this scene, it is evident that individualization is an integral theme to Nightmare, not only in the personal terror enacted on Tina by Freddy Krueger, demonstrating that the approximated family structure established earlier offers little practical support, perhaps indicative and concurrent to the increasing lack of state support available to the Reagan generation. It is at this point in the narrative that we are introduced to Nancy’s father, Donald Thompson (John Saxon), a character whose status as both a police lieutenant and a father brings together a number of themes in the film. The narrative now shifts to focus on Nancy as the central protagonist, taking over from Tina. We see the dysfunctional nature of the fractured Thompson family almost immediately through dialogue, as the tensions between Nancy’s divorced parents erupt into recriminations over immediate concern for the young student’s wellbeing in the aftermath of her friend’s death. Donald’s dual role, being Nancy’s father and holding a position of power in the police department, establishes him squarely as an authority figure in the narrative. Soon, however, we see his ineffectiveness in both positions, and the impact of this on Nancy is she is pursued by Krueger, with minimal help and support from her father, and at times, active hinderance. Perhaps one of the most illuminating scenes in this regard is when Donald uses his daughter as bait in his attempt to capture Rod, the chief suspect in Tina’s death, who is still at large. As Rod captures Nancy and attempts to convince her of his innocence, Donald appears from nowhere. Dressed in police uniform and pointing a gun directly at both Rod and Nancy, he is clearly present in his role as a police lieutenant here, impressing his authority with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. After Nancy’s failed attempt to thwart his capture of Rod, she expresses her disappointment, in a childlike manner reflecting her sense of betrayal: “Daddy, you used me.” Donald does not attempt to comfort Nancy, but rather authoritatively chastises her for attempting to go to school under her current mental circumstances. This scene makes visible some of the central tensions of Nightmare, as Donald chooses his societal position of authority over the safety and wellbeing of his daughter, in order to arrest someone both Nancy and the audience know is innocent. This demonstrates not only the inherent uselessness of societal authority structures such as the police in this specific context, but also the almost complete fragmentation and dissolution of the Thompson family as a supportive structure for Nancy, mediating the decline of the American suburban family context in the 1980s. This meaning is also emphasized in the scene depicting the death of Rod, while he is in police custody. While both the audience and Nancy are aware of Rod’s innocence (of all the director’s work, Nightmare toys with dramatic irony the most effectively), his death at the hands of Krueger takes place during a confrontation between Nancy and

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her father, as she attempts to convince him of his innocence. As Nancy tries to reason with her father, he is once again more concerned about asserting his authority, both as Nancy’s father and as part of the police. As he argues with Nancy, her pleas for his help go unaddressed, and Rod is killed in his cell. The depiction of Nancy’s father in this scene presents one of the central tensions of Reaganism—a visible attempt to restore authority to traditional sources of respectable structural power such as the father and the police, albeit in an America where their status within some communities has changed (it is worth noting that Nightmare pre-dates the Los Angeles riots, but that Craven would return to this theme in 1991 for The People Under the Stairs). The disintegration of the Thompson family unit is even more evident through the depiction of the dynamic between Nancy and her mother, Marge Thompson (Ronee Blakley). While Marge attempts to provide comfort and support to Nancy, it is almost entirely ineffective. This is partially due to the individualized nature of the terror enacted upon Nancy by Freddy, but also related to the futile nature of the support Marge attempts to provide, compounded by the role reversal undertaken by mother and daughter. As Nancy attempts to stave off Krueger’s attacks through staying awake, it is clear that in opposition to Donald, Marge exerts almost no authority over her daughter. Marge’s attempts to assist Nancy are limited to ineffectual gestures, such as offering her daughter warm milk and to turn down her bed. As Nancy’s defiance towards Krueger grows, the role reversal between Marge and Nancy is complete. As Nancy prepares to face the killer, we see her put her alcoholic mother to bed, in the same way a parent would help their child to sleep. Again here, through dialogue, a distinction is drawn between Marge and Nancy, as Marge advises Nancy, “Sometimes you have to turn away too.” Rather than providing Nancy with support in her final showdown with Freddy, Marge advocates for withdrawal. This again demonstrates the weakness of the family unit, as not only is Nancy unable to look to her parents as a source of support and protection, but she is also required to take on a maternal role with the very person who should be providing it for her. In tandem with Nancy’s futile attempts to gain assistance from her father, there appears to be a generational line drawn within the family, again speaking to the depiction of parents and their children within the film but foreshadowing the revelation that Nancy’s parents have already confronted Krueger in their past and, in doing so, ultimately failed to protect their offspring, setting off the chain of events that the current generation is paying for with their lives. This revelation speaks to arguably the most important concern of Nightmare—the failed revolution of the 60s. It is possible to read the parents’ incomplete attempt to punish Krueger as a metaphor for the failure of the ideological revolution of the Kennedy generation in the US, which ultimately led to the return of conservative values, perhaps exemplified by Nixon’s re-election and then the Reaganist 80s, and a key

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element of this generational divide. This symmetry is further stressed through the name of the film itself, as Elm Street was the location of the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, an event certainly evocative of the failure of the 60s from an ideological perspective, something Craven would have been undoubtably cogent of considering his experiences as a humanities lecturer. As represented in Nightmare, one generation’s failure to secure a better future, or to at least have learned from that disaster (which, with its title, Craven proposes Kennedy’s assassination was), was consequential in relation to the struggles of the next. This factor alone exemplifies Wood’s concept of the American Nightmare, almost directly functioning as a very literal (not to mention titular) “return of the repressed” within the diegetic world of the film. While the focus is largely on the dysfunction of the Thompson family unit, it is important to note that all the other avenues of support Nancy attempts to seek assistance from prove to be futile. The school, the police, even the sleep clinic she visits with her mother, are all unable to protect her from Krueger. Furthermore, her attempts to resist are also thwarted, as is perhaps more explicitly demonstrated through the actions of Glen’s parents, who actively prevent Nancy from saving their son through unplugging the phone, meaning that she cannot wake him. It is perhaps also important to note that Nancy’s active resistance to Krueger has marked the character as a feminist final girl, even comparing her with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween, who has been argued to be an example of an “anti-feminist” final girl.27 A particularly problematic element of Kyle Christensen’s argument that Strode is antifeminist points to her domesticity as antifeminist, particularly her role as a babysitter. Christensen’s argument is that Nancy is a stronger model of feminism, consisting of three elements—her engagement with men, her defiance towards her mother, and her resistance to Freddy Krueger, particularly within the sphere of her home. While Christensen notes that there is a form of role-reversal where Nancy takes on a maternal role towards Marge, he argues that this scene signifies the differences between mother and daughter. While this is certainly demonstrated within the text, it is unclear how this factor is materially different from the maternal elements of the characterization of Laurie Strode, who also demonstrates resistance towards Michael Myers within the narratives of Halloween and Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal, 1981). It is reductive to clearly define the maternal elements of either character as feminist, or antifeminist, given that maternity itself is inextricably linked to feminist theory, particularly in terms of the right to be or not to be a mother. In fact, the reduction of both Nancy and Laurie to a feminist/antifeminist binary is potentially problematic in and of itself, particularly when Nancy’s feminism is tied to her especially active resistance against family and antagonist. In fact, rather than as a feminist trait, it is possible to view Nancy’s resistance as a failing of the support structures and an expression of

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individualism, rather than necessarily a feminist exemplar. Both Nightmare and Halloween depict a young woman being terrorized by a male killer. As Christensen notes, the failure of support structures is a key element of the slasher genre and often enables narrative tension. It is also important to note then, that in Halloween, Laurie is ultimately saved by Michael Myers’s psychiatrist Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who shoots the murderer to the ground. The ending of Nightmare is more abstract in terms of an ultimate defeat of Krueger, but in the climax of the film, there is no support, either societal or familial, for Nancy. The character’s active resistance can alternatively be read as symbolizing the will power of a desperate individual who has been failed by the very institutions which are ultimately supposed to protect her. For this reason, it is difficult to classify Nancy’s strength as especially feminist or otherwise. However, that is not to say that Nightmare does not at least mediate feminist thought. Perhaps the famous phrase associated with second wave feminism best elucidates the inherent feminist expression in Nightmare—the personal is political.28 While Nancy bravely resists, there is undoubtedly a sexualized element to her terrorization at the hands of Krueger.29 It is not so much her resistance that is important for feminist thought, but the visible impact of her experiences. This can almost certainly be read as either allegorical or explicitly in relation to sexual violence, specifically in terms of subsequent trauma. This is visible in a number of moments throughout the film, perhaps most notably in a scene where Nancy is stalked by her nemesis in her bathroom. While she is in the bathtub, asleep and visibly unconscious, Krueger’s phallic knife glove rises from between her legs, reaching towards her. The disturbing nature of the shot is heightened through Nancy’s lack of awareness, and the fact that it is a short precursor to Krueger attempting to drown her in the soapy water. The imagery utilized here clearly connotes a sexual dynamic to the killer’s pursuit of Nancy. This meaning is further emphasized in a later scene where over the phone, Freddy Krueger tells the heroine, “I’m your boyfriend now Nancy,” as a tongue protrudes through the receiver towards her mouth, again incorporating phallic imagery but also a sexualized violation of Nancy in and of itself. Nancy’s reaction here clearly demonstrates the impact of this, as she immediately recoils and attempts to destroy the phone. As the film progresses, Nancy’s trauma plays a bigger role, eventually manifesting itself through the gray in her hair as a visual representation of the psychological impact of her experience. This factor is also relevant in terms of the climax of the film, where the final girl overcomes Freddy Krueger through “taking back the energy she gave him” and turning her back on him. While it is problematic to simplify the impact of trauma to something that can be wished away, let alone turned away from, such a scenario nonetheless highlights the internal, personal nature of Nancy’s struggle, and her strength in refusing to let herself and her future be defined by her antagonist.

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The ambiguous ending of the film also foregrounds the impact of Freddy Krueger’s actions on Nancy. After Nancy has seemingly overcome the antagonist, turning her back on him as he disintegrates, she walks through a door to a supposed “new life”. We see that both her mother and her friends have returned to life and await her arrival so that she can be driven to school. As Nancy prepares to enter the car with her friends, in this seemingly idyllic world, her mother is pulled through the door of the Thompson household, and the teenagers now become trapped within their vehicle by a canopy in the distinctive colors of Freddy Krueger’s jumper. It is not made clear within the scene if the events take part in the dream world or the waking world. It could even be a nightmare, but not necessarily one that is manipulated by Krueger; instead this might all be in Nancy’s mind as she “enjoys,” following the “defeat” of her stalker, a night of sleep. Either way, this ambiguous ending demonstrates the continuation of Nancy’s terror at the hands of Krueger: his very presence highlights the impact that the events of the narrative have had on the teenager. Nancy’s “new” experiences in the sleep world illustrate the ways in which personal trauma can never be fully controlled within this sphere and become released when the victim is most vulnerable and unable to control their thoughts. This powerful (and often unfairly criticized) conclusion, combined with the internal nature of Krueger’s terrorization of Nancy, relate to Wood’s concept of an ambiguous Other, as he identified within his concept of the American Nightmare. Whether or not Krueger is indeed “defeated,” Nancy’s nightmare continues. In many other slasher films, within the contained narrative of the film, the killer is vanquished by the final girl, or as in the case of

Figure 5.3  Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson has been celebrated as one of the genre’s most resourceful “final girls”

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Halloween, she is saved by someone else, and lives. Wood asserts that the power of The Last House on the Left in part derives from our inability to distance ourselves or look away from the violence on the screen, but with Nightmare Craven denies us the distance from Nancy’s trauma, through a clever ending that refuses to provide simple closure to her ordeal. Hence, as discussed in this chapter, there is a clear argument that the underlying thematic concerns of Nightmare demonstrate a rebuttal of Wood’s argument that the later work of Craven, and the 1980s slasher film as a whole, do not engage with wider thematic concerns relating to American society itself. It is definitely possible to locate a vision of Wood’s American Nightmare within the film through its concern with the stability of the American family unit during the Reagan era, and the depiction of Nancy’s singular struggle as she is pursued (and indeed perused) by Freddy Krueger, in relation to the context of individualism and Reaganism during the 80s. Rather than a form of active resistance, it is entirely possible to view the events of the film and Nancy’s actions in light of fighting against a number of recurring traumatic events, meaning that it is almost impossible to reduce the film to one where teenagers are simply punished for having sex, as alleged by Wood. Further, rather than reinforcing social structures, the film offers a clear indictment of them, demonstrated through their inability to support Nancy in any meaningful way, let alone even try and understand her many traumatic encounters. While Nightmare was of course the genesis of an incredibly successful franchise, complete with merchandise, it is perhaps more useful to situate the film itself outside of this wider series and the Freddy phenomenon, and instead within Craven’s own body of work. Here, we can see a clear alignment with both earlier and later efforts, and specifically his consistent concern with the direction of American society and the “idealism” of the lily white suburban American family, as well as strong individualistic young female characters. Perhaps the most instructive connection is with The Last House on the Left. While Nightmare is clearly a glossier, more polished film with less explicit violence and mass market appeal, there are clear thematic links. While The Last House on the Left addressed the specific socio-political context of the early 70s, Nightmare addresses that of the early 80s. In doing this, we can clearly see Wes Craven’s depiction of the American Nightmare, continued. notes   1. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).   2. Ibid.   3. Robin Wood, “What Lies Beneath?” in Steven Jay Schneider, Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pxiv.

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  4. Kyle Christensen, “The Final Girl versus Wes Craven’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema,” Studies in Popular Culture (Vol. 34, No. 1, 2011), 23–47.   5. The decision to focus on the original film text rather than the franchise as a whole was made to facilitate situation of the film within the wider context of Craven’s career, looking at the specifics of the original 1984 film text.   6. Wes Craven, The Last House on the Left (American International Pictures, 1972); Wes Craven, Nightmare (New Line Cinema, 1984).   7. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, 114.   8. Wood, 168.   9. Wood, 173. 10. Wood, R., “What Lies Beneath?” in Schneider, S., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pxviii. 11. Ibid., pxiv. 12. Valerie Wee, “The Scream Trilogy, ‘Hyperpostmodernism,’ and the Late-Nineties Teen Slasher Film,” Journal of Film and Video (Vol. 57, No. 3, Fall 2005), 44–61. See also Adam Rockoff, who claims Scream to be “extraordinary,” noting how its postmodern satire also tapped it into a “smart, jaded and appreciative” youth audience. In Adam Rockoff, Going to Pieces (North Carolina: McFarland, 2002), 182. This comment is echoed by Richard Nowell, who notes how the Scream template was built upon, and its “eye-catching ticket sales [. . .] almost matched by” cash-in titles such as I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997). In Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2011), 249. 13. David Kingsley, “Elm Street’s Gothic Roots: Unearthing Incest in Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Journal of Popular Film & Television (Vol. 41, No. 3, July 2013), 145–53. 14. Douglas L. Rathgeb, “Bogeyman from the ID: Nightmare and Reality in Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Vol. 19, No. 1, January 1, 1991), 36–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1991.9944106. 15. Kelly Bulkeley, “Touring the Dream Factory: The Dream-Film Connection in The Wizard of Oz and A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Dreaming (Vol. 9, No. 1, March 1, 1999), 101–9, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021321227642. 16. Jeffrey Steven Podoshen, “Home Is Where the Horror Is: Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Vol. 35, No. 7, October 3, 2018), 722–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2018.1472535. 17. Kyle Christensen, “The Final Girl versus Wes Craven’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street”: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema”; Jonathan Markovitz, “Female Paranoia as Survival Skill: Reason or Pathology in A Nightmare on Elm Street?,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Vol 17, No. 3, October 1, 2000), 211–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509200009361492; James Kendrick, “Razors in the Dreamscape: Revisiting Nightmare and the Slasher Film,” Film Criticism (Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 2009), 17–33, 80. 18. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 35, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400866113. 19. Kendrick, “Razors in the Dreamscape: Revisiting Nightmare and the Slasher Film.” 20. Christensen, “The Final Girl versus Wes Craven’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema.” 21. Amanda, “Divorce, 1981-Style,” AARP, 2016. Accessed December 5, 2022. Available from: https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friends-family/info-2016/divorce-1980s.html. 22. James Midgley, “Society, Social Policy and the Ideology of Reaganism,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare (Vol. 19, No. 1, 1992).

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23. Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address.” Accessed December 5, 2022. Available from: https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/128614/inaguration.pdf. 24. Colin Hutchinson, “Reagan, Thatcher and the 1980s,” in Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel, edited by Colin Hutchinson (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2008), 15–37, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594906_2. 25. In fact, rumors abound that the Thompson house was featured in Halloween, establishing its slasher film notoriety and its distinctly American suburban aesthetic: Alex Aronson, “Was the Iconic ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ House Used Years Prior in ‘Halloween’?,” Bloody Disgusting (blog), January 5, 2022. Accessed December 5, 2022. Available from: https://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3591404/iconic-nightmare-elm-street-houseused-years-prior-halloween/. In recent years, the house has again attracted attention as the setting of Bo Burnham’s 2021 Netflix special, Inside. 26. The invocation of Thanksgiving here, as represented by the Turkey, is particularly interesting. Although Thanksgiving is widely celebrated as a family holiday in America, its very origin speaks to the violent, colonial-settler history of the nation. 27. Kyle Christensen, “The Final Girl versus Wes Craven’s ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema.” 28. While attributed to the title of the 1968 book by Carol Hanisch, the phrase arose from the 1960s student movement. 29. It is important to note that while Krueger may have been initially conceived as a child molester, Craven deliberately excised this element from his characterization in the final film. It did, however, return in the 2010 remake.

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6

The “Nightmare” on Elm Street: The Failure and Responsibility of Those in Authority Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk

T

he genre of cinematic horror is adept at representing trauma and evil. As Robin Wood notes, in contrast to realist genres, “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror.”1 Horror reveals what more realist genres—including the law—hide.2 But what kind of stories can and should horror tell about evil and trauma? In our chapter, we explore how we might go beyond dominant, thematic readings of evil and trauma in horror films to read against the grain of films, and to discover more hidden representations of shared anxiety and fears. At first glance, Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund) is the obvious source of evil in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven conceptualized Krueger as a child killer, but the discourse of “stranger danger” that emerged in the 1980s, alongside the social fear that pedophiles were hiding in plain sight in seemingly safe suburbs, meant that Krueger also carried the weight of the monstrous figure of the molester, stalking the underage in their dreams and killing them in reality.3 In this paper, we argue that the film invites a reading of responsibility that goes beyond that arising from the simplistic binary of the monster/victim. Here, we explore the responsibility and culpability of people and institutions in authority, rather than of the monstrous (and exceptional) Krueger himself. We argue that law and its mechanisms are at the heart of the failure of authority, supported by other institutions, including the family—the teenage victims’ parents create the monster through an act of vigilante justice, and absolutely fail to protect their children from him. Author Adam Rockoff has claimed that, in his earliest drafts of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven portrayed Krueger as a child molester.4 The author

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Figure 6.1  Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) fails to convince her mother (Ronee Blakley) that Freddy Krueger is real

has also stated that Craven changed his mind before filming and instead characterized Krueger as a sadistic child murderer, downplaying the sexual abuse element to avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized cases that occurred in California around the time of the film.5 This approach reflects a tendency in the horror genre to only rarely portray child sex offenders.6 This may possibly be due to the taboo of such a (perceived as) “lowbrow” genre representing such a serious and taboo subject, and/or perhaps due to a contemporary perception of sex offenders as real-life monsters who disrupt the comforting contract with audiences of horror fiction that the villains, while scary, are not “real.” Whether apocryphal or not, the sexual component of Krueger’s character remains “subtext.” Indeed, other writers have also picked up on this. For instance, Ric Meyers notes how Krueger, in the original film, is presented as “a possible child molester.”7 Before re-watching the film, we both remembered Krueger as a sex offender. It is implied that Krueger sexually molested Elm Street children—Marge labels him a “filthy” child murderer, for instance, implying that something beyond slaying was involved. Krueger’s (attempted) homicides of teenagers are highly sexualized: he murders Tina (Amanda Wyss) in her postcoital bed beside her lover; his bladed hand appears between the legs of Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) in the bath; and Krueger sinks with Nancy’s mother into her bed. These moments have led some theorists to argue that “despite having been excised from the film almost entirely, then, it is still valid to interpret Krueger’s character as having molested his victims.”8 In the less successful remake, in which Craven was not involved, Krueger is explicitly a sex offender.9

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Krueger is portrayed as a sadistic child murderer released on a legal technicality and then burned alive by the frightened and angry parents of Elm Street. The parents’ response is characterized as arising from a failure of the legal system to deliver justice. All the parents are damaged in some way, and in turn inflict this damage on their children. While a thematic reading of Nightmare gives the story of an exceptional monster, our reading of the film also reveals a more banal and everyday evil: the failure of people and organizations in authority to listen to children, to take their claims of harm seriously and to protect them. This chapter situates this failure of people and organizations in authority using a horror framework in the context of contemporary recognition of systemic inabilities to protect against and respond appropriately to child sexual abuse. Here, horror encodes and arouses the anxieties and concerns of the age—good versus evil, the im/possibility of justice, the failure of authority to adequately respond, prevent, protect, or believe, and, ultimately, the ways authorities not only fail to redress wrongs, but in fact create, exacerbate, or enable such problems. The genre of horror is often perceived as lacking in seriousness,10 as being too visceral and too popular,11 but it can in fact be a source of serious philosophical, social, and legal critique.12 In the way it represents excess—that which is outside the regular frameworks of representation— horror better reflects anxieties about law and society’s failure to respond to harms, and even law’s frameworks of meaning, than do realist genres. In the Nightmare on Elm Street films, Freddy Krueger is the most obvious threat to the teenagers’ safety. While teenagers are situated as both children and adults—an ambivalent category—they are clearly under the jurisdiction of their parents in Nightmare, and yet never provided with the protections that this jurisdiction should afford. Freddy is constructed as a malevolent monster whose sole focus is to do harm. Central to the construction of monsters is the transgression of the borders of humanity. For Foucault, the production of monsters should be understood as a double breach of both nature and law, “combin[ing] the impossible and the forbidden.”13 Krueger is dead but a living presence in dreams. He occupies the liminal space between existence and death, waking and sleeping, but any injuries that occur in the victim’s nightmares are carried through into real life. Freddy’s origin story suggests that he was born evil, an abomination that transgressed the laws of God and humanity from the beginning: his mother was a nun working in an insane asylum who was repeatedly raped by patients, and Krueger was “the bastard son of 100 maniacs.”14 Krueger’s wicked deeds are signified by physical marks—he is scarred with horrible burns and wears a bladed glove. The entire franchise thus portrays an archetypal plot of good versus evil, with the teenagers, as the innocent victims/survivors, forced to fight for their lives against the monstrous threat of Freddy Krueger (at least until adults become the focal point of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994).

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This focus on the monster generates a certain model of wickedness—an individualized, mythological evil. Here, evil is outside the normal operation of law and society. However, this model belies the extent to which the people and institutions in authority are also responsible, even complicit. Unlike Freddy Krueger, these people and institutions of authority claim to offer protection and security, and their failure to help the teenagers—in fact, often their acts undermine the youngsters’ safety—is more abject than the actions of the antagonist. Although the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is fictional, this everyday complicity is actually common and is partly enabled by law and society’s excessive focus on the significance of individual pedophiles to the production of harm to children. This has some parallels with the framing of child sexual abuse in organizations. Although there are many ways to frame sexual offending against children (for example, as the result of mental illness or as “ordinary” people offending opportunistically), since the 1990s there has been a tendency, particularly in the media, to portray sex offenders as monsters.15 For example, in his analysis of sex offending, Terry Thomas argued that in an explosion of media interest, pedophiles became thoroughly demonized as “monsters”—“evil,” “beasts,” and “fiends.”16 Jon Silverman and David Wilson have argued that with the new millennium, pedophiles and terrorists are the “bogey men” of contemporary times.17 In Virtual Pedophilia, Gillian Harkins argues that by the early millennium, “the paedophile” evolved into a virtual figure, a threat only made visible when data was transformed into prediction; this perceived threat became the occasion to increase surveillance and harsher laws that expanded the carceral state, an increase in state violence that also affected minorities most harshly.18 Epithets used to describe pedophiles in the media include evil, fiend, predator, demon, pervert, and monster.19 The form of responsibility the narrative of the pedophile elicits is simple: society’s responsibility to protect children from sexual abuse is absolved by identifying and removing deviant pedophiles from “normal” life as quickly as possible. The media focuses on a small number of these suspected or convicted offenders,20 presenting them as a separate species, subhuman, or a “breed apart.”21 Pedophiles are frequently portrayed as having almost supernatural powers, causing lasting harms by evading law and society’s rigorous, normal frameworks of responsibility—and not unlike Freddy Krueger, going unseen.22 From the 90s onwards, popular discourse increasingly focused on the threat of the pedophile, who was constructed as a highly dangerous stranger, who attacks, sexually abuses, and possibly kills children, but might also avoid capture and justice.23 This accords the pedophile extreme powers and suggests that only extreme measures by law and society can possibly defeat him.24The narrative of the exceptional pedophile is a dangerous one. While there is no doubt that individual offenders should be held accountable and brought to justice, evidence shows that it is also important to look at the

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people and structures around children and how they fail them. There are many examples across the world of recent inquiries, commissions, and interrogations that have focused on the significance of the roles of people and organizations in failing to protect children from child sexual abuse. For example, in the wellknown case of Larry Nassar, attention went beyond Nassar’s individual responsibility to the complicity of the individuals and organizations that surrounded and shielded the perpetrator while he sexually abused American gymnasts for decades with seeming impunity.25 The Catholic Church has been the subject of international critique for its long-term protection of child sex offenders and failure to protect children.26 Jurisdictions within the United Kingdom and Australia have held public inquiries into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, finding that establishments had failed and continued to fail to protect against, and respond adequately to, child sexual abuse.27 In the contemporary era of #MeToo, there is increasing awareness and condemnation of rampant sexual crimes committed over long periods of time by perpetrators such as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein—focusing not only on these individuals, but on the corporations, boards, and people who complicitly shielded and enabled them. These crimes are not new. What these and other cases show is not only how widespread and unchecked sexual abuse is, including towards those aged under 18, but also how many people and organizations around the perpetrator disregard or even enable it.28 The horror genre has a history of reading against the grain of dominant narratives of authority. In her analysis of slasher films, Vera Dika influentially argues that they share a persistent narrative paradigm that is characterized by several cinematic and dramatic features: camera angles and soundtrack cues, stock characters, an unaware or ineffectual adult community, and a revenge motif, as well as sexual vengeance.29 A core trope of stalker films is that of ineffectual authority figures who fail to believe or acknowledge the danger at hand.30 Dika focuses on the failure of individual adults, but we argue that this analysis should extend to organizations of authority, particularly those of the legal system, including the police and courts. The category of enablers needs to be expanded to include the people or organizations in authority who fail to fulfil their duty to act. While the dominant model of culpability in society and law focuses on individuals intentionally doing the wrong thing,31 philosophers of wickedness have pointed to a classic, negative model of wickedness or evil as the lack or dearth of goodness, the wickedness of failing to take care, to be responsible.32 The advantage of this model is that it incorporates not only individual failure to act, but organizational failure to act. Both Nightmare and recent inquiries into child sex offending within organizations show that the failure to act, to speak up, is integral to enabling the perpetrator to continue offending. This archetype is strongly represented in Nightmare on Elm Street. Not only do parents, police, and other traditional authorities and institutions fail to protect the

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teenagers in the film, but their actions and lack of responsiveness make them as dangerous to the young people as Freddy Kreuger, the narrative “monster.”33 Moreover, as we consider below, the failures of authority and actions of the parents are arguably what created this monster. Those in authority at best fail to protect children, but at worst are complicit in Freddy’s actions. t h e fa i l u r e o f a u t h o r i t y a n d pa r e n t s coded as harmful

Parents in slasher films almost always fail to protect their children.34 In the process, slasher films challenge assumptions about the family and the home as sites of safety.35 At best, parents are distracted or absent (as in the classic Halloween [John Carpenter, 1978]) and in Nightmare this is represented as facilitating Freddy’s access to their children. Tina, the first character slain by Freddy, is killed while her parents are absent. Her father has abandoned her. Although Tina’s mother is aware Tina has had a nightmare and her nightie is ripped, she is distracted by her lover, then leaves for Las Vegas for two days. It is Tina’s friends, rather than her parents, who console her after the nightmare and offer to stay the night so that she is not alone. Because of the frequent lack of parental supervision, Tina’s boyfriend Rod Lane is also able to sleep in the house. Tina is killed by Freddy after having sex with Rod. The parents do not listen to or believe the teenagers, despite increasing evidence that what they are claiming is true, or at least beyond the usual frameworks of understanding

Figure 6.2  Tina (Amanda Wyss) is an early victim of Freddy’s

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(if not actual images and stories of trauma that demand attention and sympathetic treatment). Furthermore, the parents do things that actively undermine the safety of their children. Despite multiple unsolved homicides, Glen’s parents refuse to let their son speak to Nancy. Instead of listening to her, the father labels her crazy and unstable: “I don’t want that kid hanging out with you, son.” Glen’s father relies on old wisdom, epitomized in the platitude: “You just have to be firm with these kids.” He takes the phone off the hook, isolating his son in their home with his ineffective parents, effectively ensuring his death. Although the parents are uniformly disappointing in the narrative of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy’s parents are particularly problematic. They have had an acrimonious divorce—in their first scene together they bicker. The only thing they can agree on is the strategy of Marge barricading the house to “protect” Nancy, which in fact locks Nancy inside with Krueger. Nancy’s mother Marge initially presents well, but by the end of the film the façade has cracked. She is a drunk, sliding to rock bottom, openly swigging vodka in the morning, not even bothering to hide the bottles around the house. Marge is hyper-anxious about unlikely threats, such as her teenage daughter drowning in the bath. Although Marge’s actions are motivated by love, they are damaging and dangerous. She takes away Nancy’s coffee machine to make her have a good night’s sleep, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. (Nancy has a spare.)36 Although the values of obedience and privilege are enshrined in the parent/child (law/legal subject) dyad, the only way to survive in A Nightmare on Elm Street is to sneak around and feign obedience. Nancy accurately describes Freddy Krueger to her parents, but they shut her down. When Nancy tries to save Glen, her mother lies on the couch, swigging from a bottle of vodka and refusing to give Nancy the key to the front door. Marge: Fred Krueger can’t come after you. I know. He’s dead. Nancy: You knew about him all this time and you pretended it was something I made up?! Marge: You’re imagining things. You’ll feel better when you sleep. Even when Marge finally admits that Krueger exists, she still refuses to listen to or believe Nancy. Judith Herman has theorized this response of willful blindness to potential harms, asserting that “it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.”37 The adults’ failure to witness—which produces their complicity to Krueger’s acts—has parallels with the bystanders of sex offences. For example, a common defense by people surrounding Larry Nassar was that of ignorance, including by coaches Martha and Bela Karolyi.

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This was despite numerous claims of abuse from multiple victims being made across time and place.38 i n s t i t u t i o n a l fa i l u r e t o p r o t e c t

A Nightmare on Elm Street displays not only parental failure, but organizational failure to protect children from Freddy Krueger. Although schools are often imagined and sentimentalized as places of safety and happiness for children—“the best days of your life” —in horror films, they are frequently sites of danger. Horror films depict schools as sites of casual cruelty, bullying, and aggression with rigid caste systems that are in turn supported by negligent or cruel institutional structures.39 Rather than offering comfort or assistance, Nancy is bullied and mocked by her peers, who think that her recurring nightmare is a quest for attention. Krueger haunts the school halls, and the basement is interchangeable with his place of death. There is no safety in numbers—Nancy falls asleep in class and is injured by Freddy in a nightmare. Petty school rules imposed to ensure order are echoed by Freddy in a menacing manner as he reminds Nancy: “You forgot your hall pass.” Public inquiries have revealed schools can also be sites of abuse, with establishments failing to protect children—whether in an active quest to protect reputation, or failure to set up appropriate systems of reporting and response.40 Craven’s film also portrays the recurring trope of horror in which medicine and psychiatry fail to protect children, due to the incomprehension and lack of recognition of Western medicine in response to threats that are outside its epistemological categories.41 Nancy’s mother takes her to a sleep disorder clinic, where Nancy pulls Freddy’s fedora (with his name on the label) out of the dream into the real world. Despite her recognition of the name, her mother still fails to believe her. Although Nancy is injured in her nightmare, the clinician can offer no solution. The doctor says: “The truth is we don’t know what dreams are.” Thus, despite recognizing the limits of his knowledge and understanding, the doctor seeks to sedate Nancy. There are multiple sites of organizational failure, including education and medical, but the primary failure in Craven’s film is surely that of the legal system. A Nightmare on Elm Street explores the failure of the legal system as a primary cause of harm to children. This is accomplished first through the classic slasher trope of the failure of police (see other 80s horrors such as My Bloody Valentine [George Mihalka, 1981]). In slasher films, police are often either killed off early (Friday the 13th Part 2 [Steve Miner, 1981]), are actively incompetent (The Prowler [Joseph Zito, 1981]), and/or are monstrous in their own right (Maniac Cop [Bill Lustig, 1988]).42 In A Nightmare on Elm Street the failure of the police is complicated by the fact that the head of police is Nancy’s father—Lieutenant Don Thompson (played by genre movie regular

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John Saxon). The choices made by the Lieutenant throughout the film are betrayals of his role as both parent and police officer. Thompson follows Nancy to catch Tina’s boyfriend. He arrests Rod, despite his pleas and Nancy’s protestations of his innocence. This refusal to listen is not restricted to the lieutenant, but a failure by the police generally. This is shown when Nancy goes to the police station to save Rod from Freddy. Nancy insists on seeing Rod but the police initially refuse, saying that “he’s sleeping like a baby,” which only makes Nancy more concerned. She is only granted access when her father finally caves in and lets her see Rod, but they arrive too late to prevent the teenager’s death in custody. Freddy makes the homicide look like a suicide. The failure of the police to listen to teenagers, and their active incompetence, are demonstrated in the finale of the film. Nancy rings her father to make a proposition: Fred Krueger did it daddy. Just come here and break the door down in exactly 20 minutes. You’ll be here to catch him. Dad: Sure, I’ll be there. I love you sweetheart. Nancy begs her father to come at midnight and he promises that he will be there. However, even at the moment of making the promise, he has no intention of fulfilling it. Instead, he sends an officer to stand outside and watch the house, breaking his pledge to his daughter. Despite another bloody, unsolved homicide in mysterious circumstances, police continue to rest on the existing practices even though these are not working. When Nancy is screaming out for help, the cop tries to calm her down, saying: Everything is going to be alright. Everything is under control. Adults and the organizations to which they belong are too slow to realize their systems of knowledge are incomplete and insufficient. Clearly, everything is not under control. Despite consistent failures by her father and the police, Nancy continues to rely on authority, and as a consequence, her life becomes in very real danger. It is only when Nancy has set fire to Freddy that her father finally enters the house, saying “Nancy, what the hell is going on?” His failure to listen to Nancy reflects the concurrent failure of legal system more broadly to listen to and believe victims (hence Krueger is let off with his crimes before being burned to death). t h e fa i l u r e o f l aw

The police are the most visible representation of the legal system, (theoretically) using legitimate state power to enforce state law. Law’s first failure concerns the

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original child murders committed by Krueger—Freddy was finally caught only after more than twenty children had been murdered, and then an incorrectly signed court affidavit exonerated Krueger from the murders he had committed:43 Marge: He was a filthy child murderer who killed at least twenty kids in the neighborhood. Kids we all knew. It drove us crazy when we didn’t know who it was, but it was worse after they caught him. Nancy: Did they put him away? Marge: Well, the lawyers got fat and the judge got famous but he forgot to sign the search warrant in the right place and he was free just like that . . . This implies that there was more than sufficient evidence to prove Freddy’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but despite this, he was released on a technicality. We are also informed that judges and lawyers profited from the case and from letting Freddy go. As a consequence of this failure, the parents burned the antagonist alive in an act of vigilante justice: Marge: A bunch of us parents tracked him down after they let him out. We found him in an old, abandoned boiler room where he used to take his victims. We took gasoline, poured it all along the place, then lit the whole thing up and watched it burn. He can’t get you now, mummy killed him. I even took his knives. So it’s okay now. You can sleep. The parental response to the failure of the legal system is more than a removal of the threat directed towards their children. The premeditated murder is a brutal and violent act of retribution. It is suggested, but not explored, that the parents are damaged as a consequence of this extra-legal act of vengeance. In line with the slasher genre trope, the parents of Nightmare are particularly problematic—self-absorbed, absent, addicted, emotionally closed off. They are tainted by this act of violence.44 In addition, Nightmare takes the failure of authority to new depths by portraying the parents as to blame for creating a monster—their actions alone created the “vengeful ghost.” A significant part of the horror of Freddy is his terrible burn scars. His classic revenge motive is to murder the children of the parents who killed him, directly visiting the sins of the parents on the children. Although Freddy was already evil, the parents created a monster with extraordinary powers through their unlawful actions—a living dead, supernatural being, who wishes to harm their offspring. Craven communicates an ambivalent message about vigilantism. The actions of the parents are comprehensible in response to the abject failure of the legal system. Their extra-judicial actions are celebrated in popular culture with classic films such as Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and also in real life, particularly in

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relation to child sex offenders. However, A Nightmare on Elm Street also suggests that their actions have harmed and tainted the community, creating a monster who is a risk to the existing social order, and who harms and kills the children they sought to protect. a m b i va l e n t j u s t i c e

In the face of ongoing failures of past and present authorities, what kind of closure is offered in A Nightmare on Elm Street? In the face of continued failure by people and systems of authority, what then are the teenagers to do? The solution the film offers is for the children to do what their parents have done: take matters into their own hands when the authorities fail to provide an adequate solution.45 Ironically, the solution is suggested by Marge on how to defeat Freddy: Marge: I guess I should have told you about him Nancy. I was just trying to protect you. I didn’t see how much you needed to know. You face things. That’s your nature, that’s your gift. But sometimes you have to turn away too. Marge gives Nancy the idea of a way to defeat Freddy. Nancy sends her father away and turns her back on Freddy Krueger—he is powered by his victim’s fear. He evaporates when he attempts to lunge at her. The first ending offers some familial justice for Nancy. In the penultimate scenes, Krueger escapes the basement and tries to smother Marge in her bedroom. Nancy’s father has followed Freddy’s burning footsteps upstairs to the bedroom and finally Don believes what his daughter is claiming. “Now do you believe me?” states the heroine. In this moment, Nancy achieves a kind of “I told you so” justice from her father. However, the film does not guarantee that this will lead the lieutenant to change his attitude to his daughter, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), which is based on a story and script from Craven, reveals that any justice Nancy achieves with her father is precarious when he refuses to help find Freddy’s bones.46 At the conclusion of the original film, Krueger and Marge disappear into the mattress of the (broken) parental bedroom, fulfilling the film’s theme of punishing the guilty. Krueger as the serial killer and Marge as the feckless mother who failed to protect her daughter. One could argue that this is an unsatisfying and precarious ending, which is further undermined in the final scenes.47 New Line required a twist ending so that Nightmare could become a franchise.48 The ending thus suggests that the question of whether the monster Freddy has been killed at all remains unresolved. In-keeping with the optimistic but ultimately unrealistic suggestion, Marge has returned from the dead in this twist—and even promises to reform:

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Figure 6.3  Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson is victimised by Freddy in the bedroom and in the bathroom, stealing her privacy

They say you’ve bottomed out when you can’t remember the night before. You know what baby, I’m going to stop drinking. I just don’t feel like it anymore. Nancy leaves the house and gets into a car with her (dead) friends. She is locked into the car as Marge is grabbed by Krueger through the window. Once again, as in the bedroom, Marge remains the focus of Freddy’s revenge. c o n c lu s i o n

Craven refused to work on the first sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street—A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985)—and was opposed to the idea of a Freddy franchise. But even if the ending of Nightmare were fully resolved with respect to Freddy’s fate, it should still leave the audience feeling uneasy, because a key source of the horror as we interpret it—the failures of authority—are neither gone, nor fully redressed.49 The monsters are real, but they are only part of the problem, and the ending’s focus on Krueger individualizes a serious social problem—focusing on individual pathologies, rather than the social and structural context that enabled offences against children. The ongoing and normal failures of parents, police, legal system—allowing, condoning, or facilitating violence—are banal, insidious, and depressing, rather than what we have been trained to think of as “horrific.” Our interpretation of Craven’s famous and influential film demonstrates how we might read against the grain

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of the dominant tropes of horror, to reveal more hidden violence that needs to be redressed. This includes horrors that are possibly registered by viewers, and which cause unease, but which are not as easily resolved. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the viewer is possibly left with an underlying feeling of uneasiness—not only because of the ambivalent ending regarding the film’s monster, but because of the unresolved violence of parental and institutional complicity. The markers for this reading are clear—Freddy is a suburban monster, produced by suburban moms and dads, who stalks the schools and bedrooms of middle-class families. But we need to acknowledge the everyday, routine horror of these institutions and their involvement in causing violence and trauma, alongside the more obvious harms of Freddy himself. Our reading of Nightmare points to ways we may work towards reading collective failures in cinematic horror, to articulate collective responsibility set in suburbs, families, schools, and other quotidian settings, where nightmares coexist with normality.50 notes   1. Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Movies and Methods, Volume 2, edited by Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 195–219, 201.   2. On law as realist genre, see Honni van Rijswijk, “Feminist Genres of Violence and Law’s Aggressive Realism,” in Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2019), 329–46, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315665733-17.   3. Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, “Freddy Lives: An Oral History of A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Vulture (October 20, 2014). Accessed December 6, 2022. Available from: https://www.vulture.com/2014/10/nightmare-on-elm-street-oral-history.html.   4. Henceforth, we will refer to A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) as Nightmare. Adam Rockoff, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1996 (Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland, 2002), 153.   5. Ibid., 151.   6. Most of the rare exceptions explicitly portraying child sexual abuse are relatively recent and include Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (2006) (Chad Ferrin, Vicious Circle Films); Evil Lenko (David Grieco, Pacific Pictures, 2004); and Silent House (Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, LD Entertainment, 2010). Incest is a more common theme—whether explicitly or implicitly. Debates about representations of serious harms have also been expressed with regard to fictional portrayals of the Holocaust. For example, see the special issue of Law & Literature (Vol. 16, No. 2, 2004).   7. Ric Meyers, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (Guilford: Emery Books, 2011), 95.   8. David Kingsley, “Elm Street’s Gothic Roots: Unearthing Incest in Wes Craven’s 1984 Nightmare” Journal of Popular Film and Television (No. 41, 2013), 143.   9. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) (Samuel Bayer, New Line Cinema). Freddy sexually molested Nancy (the final girl) and her friend Quentin when he was a groundkeeper at the childcare centre. 10. Robin Wood, “The Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment (1978), 25.

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11. Clive Bloom, “Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition,” in A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated 2012), 213. Accessed November 20, 2020. Available from: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ uts/detail.action?docID=843409. 12. James Grant, The Curriculum of Horror: Or, the Pedagogies of Monsters, Madmen and The Misanthropic (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing 2019)., 31. 13. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 2003), 64–5. 14. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, New Line Cinema, 1987). 15. For example, see Meyer’s analysis of The News of the World’s “Name and Shame” campaign: Anneke Meyer, “ Evil Monsters and Cunning Perverts: Representing and Regulating the Dangerous Paedophile,” in Popular Culture, Crime and Social Control, Volume 14, edited by Mathieu Deflem (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2010), 195–217. 16. Terry Thomas, Sex Crime: Sex Offending and Society (London: Willan, 2005). 17. J. Silverman and D. Wilson, Innocence Betrayed: Paedophilia, the Media and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 18. Gillian Harkins, Virtual Pedophilia: Sex Offender Profiling and US Security Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2020). 19. Vikki Bell, “The Vigilant(e) Parent and the Paedophile: The News of the World Campaign and the Contemporary Governmentality of Child Sexual Abuse,” Feminist Theory (Vol. 3, No. 1, 2002), 83–102. 20. Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 21. Bill Hebenton and Terry Thomas, “Sex Offenders in the Community: Reflections on the Problems of Law, Community and Risk Management in USA, England and Wales,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law (Vol. 24, No. 4, 1996), 427. 22. Penny Crofts, “Monsters and Horror in the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,” Law and Literature (Vol. 30, No. 1, 2018), 1–26. 23. Jenny Kitzinger, “The ‘Paedophile-in-the-Community’ Protests: Sex Crimes in the News and Media Audiences as Activists,” in Sex as Crime?, edited by Gayle Letherby and others (London: Routledge, 2011), 15). 24. Crofts, “Monsters and Horror in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse”. 25. https://www.nassarinvestigation.com/en 26. For example, Sinead Ring, Kate Gleeson, and Kim Stevenson, Legal Responses to Historical Child Sexual Abuse (London: Routledge, 2020); Dave MacDonald, “Classifying the Monster: The Erasure of Familial Child Sexual Abuse in the Wood Royal Commission Paedophile Inquiry,” Griffith Law Review (Vol, 29, No. 1, 2020), 91; Patrick Parkinson, “Child Sexual Abuse and the Churches: A Story of Moral Failure?,” Current Issues in Criminal Justice (Vol. 26, No. 1, 2014), 119–38; Patrick Parkinson and Judy Cashmore, “Assessing the Different Dimensions and Degrees of Risk of Child Abuse in Institutions,” (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse 2017). 27. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/) and the UK Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (https://www.iicsa.org.uk/). 28. Zachary D. Kaufman, “When Sexual Abuse is Common Knowledge—But Nobody Speaks Up” (Social Science Research Network, 2018) SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3225992. Accessed October 26, 2020. Available from: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3225992..

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29. Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle (Cranbury, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990); Vera Dika, ‘The Stalker Film and Repeatability’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video (No. 1, 2021). Dika prefers to term these films as “stalker,” but it is more common and accurate to label them “slasher.” 30. Rockoff, 2002, 11. 31. Penny Crofts, “Criminalising Institutional Failures to Prevent, Identify or React to Child Sexual Abuse,” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy (No. 6, 2017), 104. 32. Augustine, The Confessions of St Augustine, translated by Edward Pusey (New York: Collier Books, 1961); Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (London: Routledge, 1984). 33. Gary Heba, “Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (No. 23, 1995), 106–9; Pat Gill, “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family,” Journal of Film and Video (No. 54, 2002), 16. 34. Slasher franchises have started to change the position of adults with the advent of the original final girl returning to grapple with the monster. For example, in recent Halloween films, where Jamie Lee Curtis’s character protects her daughter and granddaughter. 35. Michael Fiddler, “Playing Funny Games in The Law House on the Left: The Uncanny and the ‘home Invasion’ Genre,” Crime Media Culture (No. 9, 2013), 281. 36. In A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988), Kristen’s mother puts tranquilizer in her daughter’s drink so she will have a good night’s sleep. She is killed by Freddy while she sleeps. 37. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Hachette UK 2015). p2. 38. Katherine Hampel, “Whose Fault is it Anyway: How Sexual Abuse has Plagued the United States Olympic Movement and its Athletes’ Comments” Marquette Sports Law Review (No, 29, 2018), 547. 549. 39. Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk, “‘What Kept You So Long?’: Bullying‘s Gray Zone and The Vampire’s Transgressive Justice in ‘Let the Right One In’” Law, Culture and the Humanities (Vol. 11, No. 2, 2015), 1–22; Gill, 2002, 34). 40. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, “Report of Case Study No. 12: The Response of an Independent School in Perth to Concerns Raised about the Conduct of a Teacher between 1999 and 2009” (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse 2015). Accessed December 6, 2022. Available from: https://www. childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/ef4f35e9-1e57-4c72-8846-7de6e1365d81/ Report-of-Case-Study-No-12; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, “Report Number 23: The Response of Knox Grammar School and the Uniting Church of Australia to Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse at Knox Grammar School in Wahroonga, New South Wales” (Federal Government 2016). Accessed December 6, 2022. Available from: http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/599fb1cb6d5b-432e-8573-126cae4ee5e3/Report-of-Case-Study-No-23; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, “Report of Case Study No. 6: The Responses of a Primary School and the Toowoomba Catholic Education Office to the Conduct of Gerald Byrnes” (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse 2015). 41. Penny Crofts, “Monstrous Bodily Excess in The Exorcist as a Supplement to Law’s Accounts of Culpability,” Griffith Law Review (Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2015). Other films that use this trope include Halloween (John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures, 1978) and the remake of Halloween (Rob Zombie, Dimension Films, 2007). 42. Pretty much all horror films. The recent Netflix film series Fear Street explores the theme of police as monsters. Craven returned to this theme a number of times: this is also a

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recurring part of Craven’s work beginning with The Last House on the Left (1972) and running through to Shocker (1989), Scream (1996), and My Soul to Take (2010). 43. Kingsley, “Elm Street’s Gothic Roots,”, 23. 44. Craven explores similar themes of the toxic family in his largely disregarded Deadly Friend (1986) two years later, and then in his better known The People Under the Stairs (1991). 45. Heba, 1995. 46. Wes Craven wrote the short story on which the film is based, and co-wrote the screenplay. 47. The Nightmare on Elm Street remake (2010) had two endings, which were available on the DVD. Kyle Christensen, “‘Look What You Did to Me!’: (Anti)Feminism and Extratextuality in the Remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010),” Journal of Film and Video (Vol. 68, No. 2, 2016), 29. 48. As discussed in Thommy Hutson, Never Sleep Again: The Making of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (New York: Permuted Press, 2006). 49. Heba, 1995,109. 50. Douglas L. Rathgeb, “Bogeyman from the Id: Nightmare and Reality in Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Journal of Popular Film & Television (Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 1991), 36.

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chapter

7

Controlling the Souls in the Machine: Wes Craven Directs for the 1985 Twilight Zone Revival Matthew Sorrento

A

fter directing several independent horror features, Wes Craven found success with the low budget sleeper hit, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but his career arguably took an equally important turn when he began directing for television with the 1978 film, Summer of Fear/A Stranger in Our House (after relocating to Los Angeles from New York). With this production, Craven gained access to a larger budget and more resources,1 albeit with material he didn’t originate (concerning a variation on the “evil child” motif, most likely inspired by Rosemary’s Baby, [Roman Polanski, 1968]). His experience working in television perhaps informed the director’s decision to direct segments of The Twilight Zone revival (CBS, 1985–7; hereafter TZ).2 Craven knew that the program would offer him the opportunity to work outside the slasher film trend to which he may have felt restricted at the time (indeed, his post-Nightmare efforts take him in different directions until Shocker in 1989). The various scripts by top writers in the field of speculative fiction would offer Craven the chance to explore “a broad range of subject matter.”3 The TZ production took an interest in Craven with its goal of attracting name talent, which included writers Harlan Ellison and George R. R. Martin, directors William Friedkin and Joe Dante, and even The Grateful Dead, with Merl Saunders, providing a new rendition of the famous theme song. While Craven had become a “name” director, he had used the horror film genre not necessarily for its conventions but as a platform to express some personal socio-political ideas.4 In TZ Craven explored themes of speculative fiction relevant to the yuppie in the Reagan era, specifically that (very eighties) figure’s nightmare in Ellison’s “Shatterday” (1.1a, September 27, 1985, the first segment of the debut episode) and “Her Pilgrim Soul” (1.12a, December 13, 1985), a fantasy for the 1980s professional in light of technological advancement.

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Figure 7.1  A young Bruce Willis stars in Shatterday

This chapter analyzes Craven’s two standout contributions to the series showing his use of 1) minimalism; 2) hybridizing speculative fiction with the art film (as discussed by David Bordwell5); and 3) tragic treatments beyond the “permanent nightmare” that closes A Nightmare on Elm Street. In his direction of “Shatterday” and “Her Pilgrim Soul,” Craven offers contrarian interpretations to material regarded by its writers as personal improvement tales.6 Instead, Craven delivers critiques of two central yuppie characters’ “wish fulfillment” for improvement that, in the end, proves futile. exploring the

“permanent

nightmare”

After establishing himself with the independent horror films Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Craven came to the West Coast to do some minor work for Sean Cunningham, producer of the former motion picture.7 While in California, Craven received an opportunity to direct the television film, A Stranger in Our House. While the project offered less creative control (with a script not originated by him, and producers guiding the overall vision), directing for television, with the benefit of talent and resources at his disposal,8 allowed Craven to explore versions of a permanent nightmare. The film’s resolution hints at an ongoing “nightmare” state, with more trauma still to come (this finale et cetera); its conclusion appears to offer resolution but proves nightmarish, while still revealing considerable terror and trauma on its

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way (this finale, it could be argued, was recycled for his 1981 film Deadly Blessing and also A Nightmare on Elm Street). Invitation to Hell (ABC, May 28, 1984), a later broadcast film, also stands out as prescient, with a family that has relocated to Silicon Valley to find a unique “hell” inside that all-American institution of “sophistication,” a country club, one which they may not escape at the end of the film. His breakthrough 1984 feature, A Nightmare on Elm Street, would prove to be an ideal rendition of the permanent nightmare, with a suburban teenager (possibly) trapped in Freddy Krueger’s dreamscape at the end of the story. As a follow-up, Craven made the TV film Chiller (CBS, May 22, 1985), obviously invoking Michael Jackson’s Thriller album and its runaway success as a short horror film, directed by John Landis. Through the satirical framework of Chiller—a mystery tale featuring an obvious killer, created by the perversions of science, who needs to be stopped—Craven also communicates a critique of yuppie culture. For example, the TV film features neoliberal exploits that are swiftly halted but instigated by a character who, quite literally, has no beating heart. As Craven looked to expand this theme, he had no interest in continuing the Nightmare franchise and passed on directing the sequel.9 Seeing an opportunity to direct in a variety of styles, Craven told his friend, TZ executive producer Phil DeGuare, that he was interested in directing for the series in 1985.10 While The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) was a financial failure, and saddled with controversy,11 CBS had bought out Rod Serling’s interest in the show after its cancellation in 1964 and made considerable money with it in syndication.12 The network brought on showrunners DeGuere and James Crocker for the 1980s revival, and executive story consultant Alan Brennert. A long-time champion of Harlan Ellison, Brennert won the former’s trust13 and was able to help sign Ellison on as story consultant (who vetted scripts for the entire series, along with writing some episodes14). As with the original series, the revival tapped into artistry of the short story, which appealed to the literary/arthouse film interests of Craven. The main thematic interest would be investigating and critiquing the neocon era, especially now that the US might be seen to have returned to the ethos of the 1950s (the classic series began at the very end of the decade, the years that the program critiqued).

“ r e pa i r ”

as repression:

“ s h at t e r day ”

After DeGuare brought Craven onto the series, he directed two scripts backto-back, “A Little Peace and Quiet” (which would become the second segment in the opening episode) and “Wordplay” (1.2a, October 4, 1985; the opening segment of the second episode).15 Following these two, he directed Ellison’s script for “Shatterday,” based on his 1975 story,16 which the producers decided

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to place as the series opener.17 It remains one of Craven’s more underrated but fascinating works.“Shatterday” dissects the yuppie male and his crisis in repairing himself. Fittingly, by featuring one character battling his alter-ego (with Bruce Willis playing both roles), it is one of the most minimalistic entries in the series. And yet “Shatterday” shows Craven moving the character cleverly through different states of mind. Ellison has noted his personal connection to the story, implying that it worked as self-help therapy for its author: he wished to transform himself into a more positive version.18 Craven directs the segment as if the alter-ego of the living character aims to repress his flawed protagonist. In this sense, Ellison’s reflection on the work invokes the dominant ego splitting, for a better version to emerge and repair the conscience. But Craven critiques this idealized version by instead showing a disastrous superego emerging.19 The script’s literary associations likely also interested Craven. With the story of Peter Jay Novins (Willis) discovering his double/doppelganger, “Shatterday” draws on a tradition, which Edgar Allen Poe introduced in his 1839 story “William Wilson” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Oscar Wilde continued, in the 1866 novella The Double and the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, respectively. The title and revised days of the week in the segment’s title cards also borrow the “dreaded days of the week” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939)—“Someday, Moansday, Duesday, Woundsday, Thornsday, Freeday, Shatterday” taken from “All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.” The Joycean “days” reflect routine as much as the toil of the workweek and expectation from others associated to it. The segment channels the weird immediately with Novins, a public relations manager involved in covering up a firm’s deceitful actions, encountering another version of himself via a phone call.20 The casting of high-energy newcomer Willis proved serendipitous, as he was already on prime-time television in the ABC program Moonlighting (1985–9), though “Shatterday” was filmed first. On set, Craven apparently encouraged the method-acting style of Willis.21 While offering vocal and emotional intensity, and embodying a young Ellison, the character of Novins represents a professional male, who feels himself to be an everyday hero, but suddenly crumbles. Craven directs Willis in tight spaces with closed, claustrophobic framing to accentuate this idea. In a pre-credits sequence, Craven and Ellison use an animated still image of Willis as Novins that is shattered and then reassembled. With the mirror conceit playing on the title (and the “personal fissure” about to come), Craven continues to use the device as the narrative proper begins. The use of the mirror may reveal a jest about psychoanalytical theory (namely, Lacanian), but more directly for the segment, it reveals divided selves battling against one another.22 When the reassembled image appears, the camera zooms out, revealing the shot of Willis to be a mirror reflection of Novins behind a bar. In this

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Figure 7.2  All roads lead to madness in Shatterday

episode Novins learns that another version of himself exists when he answers a phone call to his apartment (I will refer to this to as the “new Peter”). When Novins calls his apartment, he is in a phone booth, the windows of which are noticeably smeared with fingerprints.23 With the booth’s obvious confinement, dirt, and isolation, Craven stresses that the usual comfort of the phone call, for business or leisure, is now charged with anxiety (also used by Craven in “Wordplay,” which focuses on a yuppie salesman’s anxiety once he loses his ability to comprehend and communicate). When Novins later returns to the booth, rain falls over the smudged glass. This handy use of pathetic fallacy suits network television, as the visual device indicates an emotional truth beneath Willis’s understandable ramped-up panic. With the murky view of Willis turning into a dripping distortion of himself, Craven visually traps Novins in emotions he had repressed for so long. In turn, Novins attempts to retaliate against the new Peter financially by withdrawing all the money from his bank account. Such an act happening to a spouse or domestic partner would constitute economic abuse, a practice not widely recognized with a name until the turn of the twenty-first century.24 Novins begins to look ill while experiencing his extended breakdown, which escalates when he learns that his mother is coming to live with him. During the phone call when the new Peter reveals this news, he wears a full pink sweater, in contrast to Novins, who is established early on as being more

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“masculine.” After the conflict builds between the double Willis roles, Craven brings the two versions of the character together in the final scene in a hotel room (on “Shatterday”), where the new Novins finally comes face-to-face with the “established” one (a scene necessitating a body double for Willis). The new Peter occupies the foreground from a comfortable space, mainly in medium shots, while Novins stands at a distance, symbolically more removed and, like his own placement within his own life story, now located in the background. Craven frames Novins like an obstacle and a presence that the emerging “new” conscience attempts to repress,25 as evident in the former’s increasingly sick appearance. But as Poe’s “William Wilson” —a main inspiration for this segment—reveals, an attempt to repress a double proves to be self-destructive. During the new Peter’s confrontation with Novins, the right sweep of the editing and direction suggest his removal from the space, especially once he takes a seat on a hotel desk in front of a window.26 It is here that Novins fades through an optical effect—with the new Peter remaining—an action representing the attempt to remove one half of the unified double. Willis’s more weakened portrayal of Novins here contrasts with his initial high-energy approach to the character that we are first introduced to. This visual presentation depicts Novins’s decay, with the new Peter a piece of wish fulfillment, but arriving too late to motivate any real change.27 The optical fade of Willis/Novins invokes a subtler take on the opening shatter of the man. And notably, it occurs without a re-assembling of the opening image, just leaving a reconstituted attempt of the self, i.e., the new Peter, looking on. Situated in a hotel, this transformation occurs in a place representing the mobile life of the yuppie, featuring a desk for production (as essential to hotel rooms as a bed). Even though hotel advertising has promised “a home away from home”28—in the 1980s, the industry also supported an overnight stay that included the easy ability to conduct business, confusing relaxation with the “never-sleeping” demands the Reagan era’s hyper-capitalism.29 Attempting to remove himself from his home, where his alter-ego has settled, Novins nonetheless remains in a production-based workspace. And fittingly, his “disappearance” occurs while sitting atop a hotel desk. Craven moves Novins from the bed to a sitting position on the desk, where he blankets himself. With Novins atop this fixture of transitory production, he becomes unstable in a framework to which he thought himself grounded. While Novins fades visually, Craven’s rendition of the tale proves that the man has, in fact, shattered himself in a futile attempt at personal transformation. a vision beyond his grasp:

“her

pilgrim soul”

Written by Brennert, “Her Pilgrim Soul” reveals how speculative fiction can depict a mature romantic relationship and its political ramifications in unique

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ways. Novelist Philip K. Dick noted how science-fiction is too often an adolescent boy’s realm where mature relationships aren’t explored, something this writer worked to address.30 By incorporating an idealized, pre-feminist woman of the past (appearing in a hologram device) bonding with a scientist in the present, “Pilgrim” presents the wish fulfillment for the latter, who’s failing in his marriage to someone who feels their lives are at the stage of planning for a child (which he rejects). Positioned as an inspirational tale of time travel,31 Craven fashions it into a critique of white male hegemony, including in the household and in the workplace. The portrayal of a strained relationship saved by an idealized fantasy reveals how the 80s yuppie, fueled by anxiety, projects expectations onto women. While committed to depicting the anxieties of longtime heterosexual relationships for men, “Pilgrim” also focuses on male companionship at work, between two scientists. While the title alludes to a quote from William Butler Yeats’s poem, “When You Are Old” (1892), it also suggests a ghost story treatment, a mode the segment will adopt later. At first, this hybrid-genre segment channels more traditional themes of sciencefiction: “Pilgrim” begins when a futuristic holographic projector that two scientists have created projects a fetus. Baffled by its appearance, one of the men, Kevin Drayton (Kristoffer Tabori), acts like a father enamored with his creation, especially once the fetus has grown into a young girl. He creates a hologram ball for her to play with, showing she has human responses and not programmed ones. Kevin’s look, a mix of amazement and adoration, recalls Dr. Frankenstein’s initial response to his creation in Mary Shelley’s novel. Though Dr. Frankenstein senses a soullessness in his creation—“his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set”—he nonetheless adores the look of his new conception: His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness. . . .32 While paying tribute to a cornerstone of science-fiction, the segment shows the ownership that Kevin feels over the hologram, as its unexpected creator. It is worth noting, however, that the choice of musical score here makes it one of the segment’s weakest moments, as the soundtrack foregrounds a syrupy orchestration to strain for a sense of wonder, Spielberg-style. It is a misstep in an otherwise unique Craven undertaking. The floating hologram of the fetus, looking almost full term (according to the other scientist, Daniel, played by Gary Cole), also nods to the Starchild at the close of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). As Kubrick’s film concludes, the Starchild arrives to Earth from the mothership as an evolved form of humanity, possibly to save

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the beleaguered planet. Similarly, the Starchild-like hologram in “Pilgrim” suggests a breakthrough in humankind, or at least, our understanding of it. To continue the allusion to 2001, Kevin plays computer chess virtually with the female hologram, once she has grown, like Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) plays against HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s film. At the end of the game, Kevin puts her in checkmate with swift clicks of his keyboard, showing his dominance and control over this “soul” inhabiting his technology. In-keeping with the science trends of the 1980s, “Soul” centers on computer programming, with the new phenomenon of “hacking” even mentioned in the dialogue and talk of emerging hologram technology.33 In the opening moments of “Soul,” Craven briefly shows new worlds appearing in the hologram, suggesting that the scientists are working on a planetarium.34 But instead of producing a graphic copy of images, their computer yields an “original.” In this sense, their work is reminiscent of Plato’s theory of “forms.” According to the philosopher, an object of the physical world (even a human) is just a copy of a greater “form” while Kevin and Daniel seem to produce a Platonic representation of a human, i.e., a soul.35 Essentially, the two scientists stumble across results greater than what they set out for, a goal in the capitalist-driven computer age and the race for technological (re: nuclear) supremacy during the Cold War. Shocked that the fetus has appeared, Kevin and Daniel initially worry that it is a computer error (just an image glitch), or possibly a prank by another department, and decide to correct the mistake by doing a hard restart of their program. As an attempt to remove the lifeform, the segment again returns to 2001, in which an astronaut scientist successfully destroys artificial intelligence that proves itself to be “living” (i.e., unplugging HAL 9000), and to Frankenstein, in which the creation is forsaken by his creator. That the restart in “Pilgrim” appears to work temporarily allows Craven to add a blend of shock and surprise once the hologram reappears as an infant child, after the scientists have left the lab for the night. The lab setting serves as a dominant male workspace, with just Kevin and Daniel working there. The intimate space may seem utopian, and one completely committed to invention. Yet once the hologram proves to be a woman, named Nola, we see males assessing her as well as her ability to grow, with her lifetime condensed to a few days and, seemingly, manageable for them to monitor. She belongs to them, and predominantly Kevin, in their workplace. Each day shows Nola moving to a new major life stage, from girlhood36 to a preteenage stage, then young adulthood the day after. When she grows to maturity (played by Anne Twomey, who later starred in Craven’s 1986 feature, Deadly Friend), Kevin realizes that she is an ideal partner for him and was, in fact, his wife in a former life. Brennert has commented that the segment works as an updating of Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948), about a romance between a man and a long-dead spirit, and a connection he learned of from others after the broadcast.37 In citing David Thomson, René Thoreau Bruckner

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notes how Hitchcock updated Portrait in his 1958 film Vertigo,38 which concerns a man’s desire to possess a woman by forcing her into an idealized version of herself. With Kevin witnessing her growth, he takes an investigatory position, though his emotional investment grows while the one at home lags. The relationship he builds with Nola’s spirit contrasts to Kevin’s marriage. Kevin avoids his wife Susan (Wendy Girard), specifically her desire to start a family, by staying at the lab for long hours. When Nola becomes a young adult, Kevin learns about her through interview sessions, in which he experiences an idealized, pure woman who blushes from the mention of the word “copulate” in a Yeats poem (perhaps indicating his own emotional immaturity and wish for a less responsible relationship).39 Ignoring the real-life experiences at home, he focuses more on a projection of life at the lab, with which he can communicate via technology. The hologram that eventually “grows” into a woman is contained in a display at the center of the room. Craven places the image at center stage, as an object of spectacle like a lab animal cage. Meanwhile, the segment portrays male bonding between the two scientists. While Craven portrays the lab as a quiet scientific utopia, both men appear to work equally, with no clear superior. Though the two scientists have equality, there is not a place for “Others” at the table, with women characters appearing only as a hologram or “the wife,” at home. Once the two scientists learn that the hologram may be the spirit of a long-dead woman, the segment employs the time travel fantasy motifs noted by Brennert, but also the ghost story genre, with the technology itself becoming “haunted.”40 Kevin learns that the spirit is Nola Granville, who grew up after the turn of the century in nearby Yonkers, New York, and gathers enough detail to establish her history. Kevin and Daniel also find out that the hologram soul has memories of the past. While talking with Nola over the days, Kevin shares his own personal history while learning hers. His fascination with the product of his science leads him to fall in love with Nola quickly, just as she matures. Craven’s most intimate scene of Kevin and Nola, when they attempt to touch hands, includes the young female asking her creator to help her remember, a direct indication for him to work as her therapist, though he uses the control to draw her closer to him. Not wanting to disorient her, he never clarifies directly that he exists in the future. When she remembers that she had a pregnancy that she lost, she admits that it is as if the events are happening for the first time, thus noting her connection to Kevin, yearning for his support. In this moment, Craven frames the image of actor Twohey’s face right between lab equipment and a PC (See Fig. 7.3), confirming that technology offers her a medium to exist, albeit one that Kevin controls. With such means, Kevin holds agency in the situation with Nola. When she decides to disappear temporarily, Kevin reacts in a disoriented manner. Additionally, when she announces her departure for good, as an aged Nola facing the stage of death, Kevin initially responds in anger, like when his wife earlier confronts

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Figure 7.3  Her Pilgrim Soul (pictured is Anne Twomey as Nola) expanded Craven’s ambitions within the television format

him in bed. Through the process, Kevin has found an answer to a timeless question in science-fiction: is there a soul in the machine? Nola appears to be vivid evidence of life, but by existing via Kevin’s technology, Craven presents the epitome of male possession over women (possibly even anticipating the darker side of the Internet such as “revenge” porn, but at this stage of time/ his career indicating concerns that the growth of technological advancement may be concurrent with the abuse of patriarchies—a theme he later explored in the often derided Deadly Friend). Craven highlights Kevin’s obsession through his physical unraveling, as he gets little sleep and appears worn, similar to the wasting-away Novins. By interacting with Nola, Kevin situates his idealized, pre-feminist woman in the past. Through her story he assesses which historical eras shaped her as she grew into maturity. That she is a woman aware of only early twentiethcentury technology—she is physically mature in 1926—naturally puts Kevin at an advantage. With Nola maturing at the onset of the radio age and near the end of silent cinema, she appears as a monochrome image (of fuchsia) with her voice emerging through in a tinny transmission. In presenting her communication with basic means, Craven channels the nostalgia that our sensibilities too often associate with these media. They offer Kevin a means to maintain hegemony, as an architect of digital information. Nola will eventually place

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a phone call to Kevin’s wife, via a computer voice modular,41 for the latter to come get him, and she will help to reunite the couple.42 This scene connects the two women in Kevin’s life, albeit in the hope that his wife will meet and presumably even learn from his idealized one. A passive viewing may assume that Kevin has “matured” and been spiritually improved by his experience with Nola—the proverbial final “fling” of the retreating bachelor. However, although such a dose of “youth” may have been welcomed, it is doubtless that his earlier pessimism will return, his wife marginalized again when “something” more appealing arrives, however briefly. Indeed, even if the script posits an enlightened Kevin at the end, and he maintains control throughout (including the moment he reads Yeats’s “When You are Old” to her, reciting the segment’s title, with the camera on him), his return to Susan continues a “modern” routine. He thus attempts to repress the memory of Nola, i.e., his idealization of the past. c o da

After offering critiques of the yuppie age for the series, Craven struggled with many of his subsequent projects.43 The feature project that followed his Twilight Zone work, Deadly Friend, interested Craven since it involved a major studio (Warner Bros.) and moved away from low budget horror.44 The film, in its released form, works in routine steps (though the final product strayed from Craven’s vision45) similar to other youth-science movies of the 1980s. Craven would lose a chance to direct Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987, which eventually went to Sidney J. Furie), since star Christopher Reeve demanded the director be removed due to his reputation.46 Returning to television briefly in 1992, Craven co-created Nightmare Café for NBC, likely tempted by the opportunity to blend fantasy, horror, and dark humor in a non-anthology series starring Robert Englund. The filmmaker later found a new avenue with Music from the Heart (1999), built as a vehicle for Madonna but eventually starring Meryl Streep. Arguably more innovative was his work on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), from an art-film-inspired concept he originally conceived for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987); his minimalist treatment of suspense in Red Eye (2005); and his well-earned success realizing screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s teenpic sensibilities in the hybrid slasher/murder mystery series, Scream (1996–2011). However, Craven’s two standout contributions to The Twilight Zone 1985 revival proved his versatility and ability to explore a theme in diverse modes, before any of the aforementioned successes. His involvement served as a career high point in the more psychological treatment of genre cinema, proving that his perceived auteur status extended beyond his more recognised blockbuster hits.

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notes

 

1. Thommy Hutson, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy—The Making of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 35; Tony Williams, “Wes Craven: An Interview,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 1980), 10.   2. Since CBS programmed the revival of The Twilight Zone in an hour-long slot, the production decided to use two or three shorter segments for each episode, instead of longer standalones for the hour slot, as the original series did in Season 4 (1963).   3. Lee Goldberg and David McDonnell, “Wes Craven’s Deadly Doubleheader,” in Wes Craven: Interviews (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 28.   4. Christopher Sharrett, “Fairy Tales for the Apocalypse: Wes Craven on the Horror Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly (Vol. 13, No. 3, 1985), 140.   5. David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” Film Criticism 4.1 (Fall 1979), 56–64.   6. Ellison has noted that the story reflected his guilt over not caring for his elderly mother. Ellison, H., “DVD Commentary: ‘Shatterday,’” The Twilight Zone: The Complete ’80s Series, DVD, 2004. Brennert has stated that his coping over losing a woman he cared for to illness, and his growth from the experience, inspired the writing of “Her Pilgrim Soul.” Craven et al., “DVD Commentary, ‘Her Pilgrim Soul.’”   7. Hutson, Never Sleep Again, 35.   8. Ibid.   9. Craven co-wrote the screenplay for the sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1986), with hopes of ending the series there and then. Brian J. Robb, Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven (Titan, London, 2000), 95. 10. Randy Lofficier, “Spotlight: Wes Craven (Interview),” in Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier, Into the Twilight Zone: The Rod Serling Programme Guide (New York: Mystery Writers of America, 1995), 240. 11. See Stephen Farber and Marc Green, Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case (New York, NY: Arbor House, 1988). 12. Brian Doan, “One Life, Furnished in Early Geekery: Harlan Ellison and The Twilight Zone,”. RogerEbert.com, September 26, 2017. Accessed August 30, 2021. Available from: https://www.rogerebert.com/features/one-life-furnished-in-early-geekery-harlan-ellisonand-the-twilight-zone. 13. DeGuere and Crocker won the influential writer’s trust and approval, as well. See: Lofficier and Lofficier, Into the Twilight Zone, 244. 14. Ellison, H., “DVD Commentary: ‘Gramma,’” The Twilight Zone: The Complete ’80s Series, DVD, 2004. The series would adapt only three Serling scripts from the original series, possibly to avoid seeming repetitive but also to avoid overt connections to the 1983 film (which was plagued with controversy). 15. Randy Lofficier, “Spotlight: Wes Craven (Interview),” in Lofficier and Lofficier, Into the Twilight Zone, 240. 16. The story was originally published in the September 1975 issue of Gallery and then collected as the title piece in Ellison’s 1980 collection of works (published by Houghton Mifflin, 1980). 17. By pairing “Shatterday” and “A Little Peace and Quiet,” the latter also directed by Craven, the episode presents unity with both pieces using minimalistic casts and settings, while the two segments mirror each other. In following “Shatterday,” “A Little Peace” depicts personal re-assimilation as a new world suddenly appears, with a 1980s housewife (Melinda Dillion), oppressed by supporting the high-paced lifestyles of her yuppie husband and children, finding a way to pause time, even as the end of the world arrives.

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18. Ellison, “DVD Commentary: ‘Shatterday’.”. 19. In discussing the source story, Joseph Francavilla notes how the divided self leads to the superego (called “Jay” in the story, referred to the new Peter in this chapter) emerging to fight the ego (Novins). In “The Concept of the Divided Self in Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ and ‘Shatterday,’” The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (Vol. 6, No. 2/3, 1993), 111. 20. Robert Rogers has argued that autoscopy, a form of hallucination which psychoanalytic critics see as the phenomenon creating “the double,” results from narcissism, an apparent trait in Novins. Rogers, Robert, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 14. 21. Ellison, who was on set a consultant, was against Willis wearing himself out. Ellison has argued that Willis’s excessive high-energy rehearsals led to him wearing out his voice and necessitating dialogue dubbing in post-production, which Ellison supervised (Ellison, “DVD Commentary”). 22. As directed by Craven, the new Peter remains a disembodied voice to Novins, until they finally meet, when Novins is wasting away, and more susceptible to hallucination. 23. It is worth noting the use of the phone as both aggressor and a source of comfort in Craven’s work. Whilst the Ghostface stalkers in the Scream series, or Nancy’s hideous and infamous experience with Freddy in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street may come to mind, states Kendall R. Phillips of Rachel McAdams’s character in Red Eye: “as with Craven’s other films, the telephone provides the chief means of safety—as she alerts the authorities with her second call—but also one of the primary conduits of danger. The technology of communication, in this way, simultaneously brings its users closer together while pushing them farther apart.” In Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 106. With this Twilight Zone episode, Craven is clearly exploring this concept, one he intends to raise in future works. 24. Adrienne E. Adams, Cris M. Sullivan, and Deborah Bybee, “Development of the Scale of Economic Abuse,” Violence Against Women (Vol. 14, No.5, May 2008), 563–88; Brewster, M. P., “Power and Control Dynamics in Pre-stalking and Stalking Situations,” Journal of Family Violence (Vol. 18, No. 4, 2003), 207–17. 25. Ellison’s point of view in the short story moves from omniscient to the perspective of new Peter (i.e., “Jay”). In removing Novins from the perspective, the story selects one point of view from many, while Craven’s perspective forces Novins’s removal. 26. Novins’s presence invokes Jung’s concept of the self and shadow as used in the doppelganger tradition, with the new Peter attempting to reclaim the self. Repressing the shadow will force it to continue to grow. Hubbs, “William Wilson,” 74. The divided self, as seen in the doppelganger tradition, also invokes the fear of losing one’s soul, which is evident in Craven’s portrayal of Novins departing like a spirit and not a human Francavilla, “Divided,” 114. 27. Craven suggests such a desire in reverse in his episode “The Road Less Traveled” (2.31, December 18, 1986, written by George R. R. Martin), in which a successful draft dodger exists as a wish fulfillment for an ailing Vietnam veteran, even if he appears as a mysterious double to the other. 28. Bärbel Pfeiffer, “‘Feeling Home Away from Home’—These Words Could Hurt Your Hotel Marketing,” HospitalityNet (March 12, 2020). Accessed November 22, 2021. Available from: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4097491.html. 29. Peter C. Yesawich, “Marketing in the 1980s,” Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 4, February 1980), 37.

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30. Lawrence Sutin, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 57. While the script went through rewrites—possibility of producer input—Brennert regards this segment as an instance where all the contributions came “together in the right way.” Moone, D. B., “Interview with American Bestselling Author Alan Brennert,” DBMoone.com, interviewed by D. B. Moone, February 15, 2019. Accessed November 18, 2021. Available from: https://dbmoone.com/2019/02/15/interviewwith-american-bestselling-author-alan-brennert/. 31. Craven et al., “DVD Commentary, ‘Her Pilgrim Soul.’” In their commentary, Craven, Brennert, and Crocker note the episode’s bravery to address anti-Semitism at the time. 32. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York, NY: Bantam [1981 edition, originally published 1818]), 42. 33. The three-layer green screen process to film the holograms in “Pilgrim” was completely new to Craven, who found it difficult. It required filming the action three separate times, unlike the optical effect of Willis fading away at the end of “Shatterday” (Craven et al., “DVD Commentary, ‘Her Pilgrim Soul’”). 34. Brennert’s short story of “Her Pilgrim Soul,” which he based on his script for the televised segment and published in 1990 as the title story of a collection, makes Kevin a professor at a university explicitly interested in the technology for planetariums. Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories (New York, NY: Tor, 1990), 196. In this segment, he works for a firm, noted in Daniel’s reference to “corporate” at the opening of the episode. 35. While Plato never clarified the soul (a complex concept) to be the ideal form of a human, he never dismissed the concept, leading scholarship to explore the idea. Brian D. Prince, “The Form of the Soul in Phaedo,” PLATO 11 (2011), 2. Accessed March 21, 2022. Available from: https://philpapers.org/archive/PRITFO-9.pdf. 36. As a young girl Nola is played by Betsy Licon, and then Danica McKellar, who also did the voiceover for Licon’s role. Craven et al., “DVD Commentary, ‘Her Pilgrim Soul.’” 37. Ibid. 38. René Thoreau Bruckner, “‘Why did you have to turn on the machine?’: The Spirals of Time-Travel Romance,” Cinema Journal (Vol. 54, No.2, Winter 2015), 1–23: 14. 39. The poem in question is Yeats’s “News for the Delphic Oracle” (1939), though the episode does not clarify the title. The pairing of a scientist with a literary scholar (the soul of Nola) offers the binary of logic versus passion in an attempt to humanize the latter male. In 1996 Barbara Streisand directed the romantic comedy-drama The Mirror has Two Faces, based on Le Miroir à deux faces (André Cayatte, 1958), which presents a similar character pairing, with her literature professor (Rose Morgan), who helps Jeff Bridges’s math prof, Gregory Larkin, connect with his students. 40. The extrapolative device also allows the episode to employ time travel, a motif in episodes of the classic series, including “The Last Flight” (1.18, February 5, 1960) and “The Odyssey of Flight 33” (2.18, February 24, 1961). 41. This phone call’s benevolent nature departs from those in the Craven segments “Shatterday” and “Wordplay” that serve as sources of anxiety. The deceptive nature of the call, however—with a computer impersonating Kevin—implies deeper issues between the married couple’s communication. 42. The lab protects its secrets, as it is heavily secured, which stops the wife from entering on her own. This scene offers another example of how Kevin’s workplace is sealed from the complications of his mature relationship. 43. Since CBS planned the show for a Friday, 10pm timeslot (like the first three seasons of the original series), the program felt it could “push the envelope” with “disturbing” and “frightening” content. Though the producers felt that this freedom got them in trouble

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with low ratings when the show moved to the 8pm slot, known as the family hour (Craven et al., DVD Commentary: “Shatterday”). CBS also had mandated that every script of the 80s revival be vetted, while the network was hands-off in this regard with the original series. Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion (West Hollywood, CA: Silman-James Press, 1992), 451. This practice likely resulted from edgier content written for the 10pm slot eventually showing up at 8pm, opposite family sitcoms Webster and Mr. Belvedere (both at ABC) and Knightrider (at NBC). 44. John Wooley, Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), p139. 45. Producers demanded reshoots that included more violence and a nightmare sequence (invoking Nightmare on Elm Street) after a negative test screening. The final cut strays from Craven’s original vision of a bleak love story. Brian J. Robb, Screams and Nightmares, 120. 46. Lee Goldberg and David McDonnell, “Wes Craven’s Deadly Doubleheader,” Fangoria (No. 57, September 1986), 64.

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8

From Friends to Monsters: The Horrors of Technology, Friendship, and the Monsters Next Door in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend Norberto Gomez, Jr.1

I

n 1986, not long after the success of his surrealist masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven decided to eschew the slasher formula that had earned him a legion of fans, and instead adapted a little-known story of a child prodigy—with a robot friend—who reanimates the corpse of his murdered female next-door neighbor (and romantic interest) using a computer chip (CPU). The result is disastrous, as his half-cyborg creation then enacts revenge upon her enemies, including her abusive father. Today, the largely ignored Deadly Friend (1986) appears to be an anomaly in the oeuvre of a filmmaker known for hugely successful, low-budget horror-slasher films—including their reinvention (the Scream projects) or expansion (for example, The Hills Have Eyes [1977] being reimagined as Mind Ripper [Joe Gayton, 1995] and then remade under its original title by Alexandre Aja in 2006). Due in part to studio interference, Craven’s final version of Deadly Friend was far from his original vision of a PG-rated “macabre love story with a twist,” with it instead featuring jarring nightmare scenes and gory violence, whose insertions clash with the vestiges of the film’s (still intact) original child-like tone, causing it to depart farther from the character-driven elements of the novel Friend (1985) by Diana Henstell.2 Even with the film’s troubles, however, it would be a mistake to disregard its representation of the individual’s and society’s relationship to technology within a horror context, especially in lieu of today’s global reliance on information and communication technologies, as well as the growing criticisms of the darker side of digital culture and technology companies. Deadly Friend retains the novel’s Frankenstein-meets-early-cyberpunkimaginings that are wholly of their time in the 1980s.3 Its interpretations of robotics, the cyborg, and what today we may call transhumanism (a philosophical movement interested in the melding of the human and machine for

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Figure 8.1  Kristy Swanson stars as Samantha in Deadly Friend

the purpose of physical and spiritual extension or evolution) are examples of that decade’s vision of a future society engaged with technological innovation inspired by new, accessible computing power. This widespread interest resulted in pop culture fantasies of cyberspace and human advancement, bringing with it centuries-old concerns over science, spirituality, dualism, and disembodiment—struggles we are again rethinking with the necessary rise of a new form of telepresence in reaction to the deadly global pandemic of 2020. Kendall R. Phillips, writing on gothic fiction’s connections within Craven’s films, illustrates the conflict between the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the mystical; for instance “tales of ghosts, spirits, and creatures of the night” which “offered a counterpoint to the rise of scientific/technological reasoning and, in their own way, a kind of reassurance that whatever the scope of science, there might always be dark corners it could not illuminate,” as well as “the limits of science and technology and the horrible consequences when those limits are transgressed.”4 Craven’s Deadly Friend adapted this clash of horror and science at what was an important time in the US in particular, when consumerism and optimism about technological advance seemed to go hand-in-hand. The director shatters this optimism in the film, as chaos ensues following the main female character’s transformation into a cyborg after her integration with the technology that was supposed to save her from her untimely death.

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Viewing the sci-fi/horror genre as a particularly potent form of cultural criticism, Deadly Friend can certainly be reconsidered as a vital addition to Craven’s filmography. Indeed, the text speaks to the director’s repeated motifs: cruel fathers, friends, and neighbors (or the monsters among us, particularly in the suburban environment). Additionally, and more broadly, the story also serves as an example of the sci-fi/horror genre which was—at the time of the film’s release—at the precipice of the Internet Age. The film’s visual representations of human-technology integration in the 80s, when cyberspace first began to enter the public lexicon, can now be compared with the ascension of the global network today in which Internet communication technologies have become deeply integrated into the social and political lives of large swaths of societies. Interestingly, persons born after the 2000s can be described as born digital, as they are unable, or have no need, to distinguish between an online-offline binary, unlike previous generations. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser described the first generation of born digital as not “thinking of their digital identity and their real-space identity as separate things, they have an identity (with representations in two, or three or more different spaces) [. . .] They have created a 24/7 network that blends the human with the technological to a degree that people have never before experienced, and it is transforming human relationships in fundamental ways.”5 What’s missing from Palfrey and Gasser’s discussion is that the online-offline distinction has disappeared even for those of a pre-digital generation, and more importantly for our purposes, the counterpart to being born digital is dying digital or even the digital dead. These boundaries—or transgressions—between life and death have been made even more explicit and tenuous during the pandemic of 2020. With respect to crossing boundaries, life-death, misinformation, online-offline, or reality-VR (virtual reality), there is also the scientific-supernatural or paranormal, which Craven’s films often investigate. Returning to Phillips’s keen insight into Craven’s gothic-technology connections in films such as Deadly Friend, Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), and the comic book adaptation Swamp Thing (1982), he writes, “what is shown to be missing is both attention to the normal limits of morality and a healthy respect for the unknown. In each case, crossing the boundary between the worlds of the known and unknown—the central premise of gothic work—unleashes unexpected and often horrific consequences.”6 In fact, in reaction to the unexpected consequences of the present digital condition, like the 80s before, today media is capitalizing on these fears with the release of new genre film and television content whose subject matter is inspired by and highly critical of current online culture, algorithms, and disinformation, and the many other boundaries, however fallacious they may be, that have been crossed (Netflix’s Black Mirror [2011–present] and HBO’s Westworld [2016–present] for example).

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d e a d ly f r i e n d a n d m e d i a v i s i o n s o f c o m p u t i n g , r o b o t i c s , a n d c y b o rg s i n t h e 1980 s

In the year of Deadly Friend’s release, Apple’s Macintosh was quickly becoming a household name, and computer games, domain names, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) followed. Personal computing and network technology was soon to transition to a publicly affordable and accessible option, allowing it to enter the interior, private spaces of family homes—connecting them to a global network. Soon thereafter, the use and marketing of these new communication technologies exploded into popular culture and media, further expanding into the decade of the 1990s. Before this, however, excited by these new developments, popular film and television media of the 80s released an onslaught of content capitalizing on concepts related to computers, hackers, the boy whiz, robotics, and cyborgs in various forms. Earlier films such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) expressed a dark and dystopian world featuring renegade replicants (androids) and those who hunted them, while The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) warned of human obsolescence and even a robot apocalypse. Some of these narratives even found themselves as part of transnational adaptations, indicating perhaps the global concerns/interests in digital and robotic evolution. For instance, Lady Terminator (H. Tjut Djalil, 1987) from Indonesia, which—although very low budget and alltoo-easily dismissed as “trash” —features a scene in front of disposed President Sukarno’s National Monument (also known as “Sukarno’s last erection”), complete with armed police, arguably attesting to “out with the old, in with the new” but, as per Deadly Friend, also nodding to the titular “lady’s” threat to antiquated forms of patriarchy in an age where gender, humanity, and even life and death are far from fixed. In all of these instances, artificial intelligence is represented in anthropomorphized form: the android, who mimics the human, and yet is portrayed as evolved beyond the failings of organics. The horror here is that the monsters look like us, or could be any of us, but they are not us—they are Other. They are embodied doppelgängers, and we are replaceable. As Dimitris Vardoulakis writes: Doppelgänger characters tend to be associated with evil and the demonic; thus one can infer that the Doppelgänger presents a notion of the subject/subjectivity that is defective, disjunct, split, threatening, spectral. With the rise of psychoanalysis, such epithets are taken to indicate a tendency toward a sense of failure or loss in the self. Thereafter, the Doppelgänger has been commonly viewed as an aberration, the stencil of a symptomatology of the self.7 Later in the decade, other American films took a decidedly lighter tone, most notably Short Circuit (John Badham, 1986) and Making Mr. Right (Susan

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Seidelman, 1987), which respectively featured comedic friendship with a robot and romance with an android, perhaps indicating how society had become increasingly comfortable with the emergence of global communications.8 Before we proceed to Craven’s Deadly Friend, it is important to describe the difference between robot and android. In the case of Short Circuit, for example, Johnny 5 is pure machine, in opposition to his human counterparts in the film. There is no human-like skin, nor body parts, to hide the machine within. There is no mimicking except in the case of personality. In fact, while there are human-like emotive elements in Johnny 5’s facial features and voice, he is quite insect-like in his design, with his bottom half being a large segment of wheels on a track. Similar to Johnny 5 is Rocky IV’s (Sylvester Stallone, 1985) Sico, a robot butler, created by a real company called International Robotics, who originally designed it for mechanical-assisted therapy.9 Sico, though slickly modern in its design, is like Johnny 5: bulky, on wheels rather than legs, and very much non-human. Although there were instances of pure disembodied artificial intelligence as antagonists during this period (SKYNET in James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator), and well before (HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968]), there is a clear visual and conceptual binary between the android and the robot in many of the films previously mentioned. Robots are portrayed as pet-like assistants— maybe more animal—while androids, in their ability to mimic, are evidenced as more dangerous. These android stories often feature the boundaries and dangers of transgressing the mysterious lines between science and consciousness, or the real and unreal, human or more-than-human—often a topic for the genre of sci-fi/horror (see also Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop [1987], or its Italian spin-off Robowar [aka Robot da guerra, Bruno Mattei, 1988]).

Figure 8.2  Although rated R, Deadly Friend shows evidence of starting out as a more familyfriendly project, with the presence of the robot BB

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It is in this context that Craven chose to produce Deadly Friend, which features BB the robot, whose design more closely resembles those of the pet-robot category: bulky, non-human, and with a track for mobility (editor’s note: the character likely influenced the later Star Wars creation of BB8). BB does not speak, but only grunts and screams like a non-human animal. BB was created and designed by teenage whiz kid, Paul Conway (Matthew Labyorteaux), who, along with his mother, Jeannie (Anne Twomey), moves to a new town, Welling, so Paul can attend a university called Polytech, where he has been given a scholarship to study neurology and artificial intelligence. Paul befriends the local newspaper boy, Tom Toomey (Michael Sharrett) and his next-door neighbor, Samantha “Sam” Pringle (Kristy Swanson), with whom Paul forms a romantic relationship. Unfortunately, the good-natured tone of Paul’s new life is severed when his cruel, elderly neighbor Elvira (Anne Ramsey) destroys BB with her shotgun for trespassing, and later, Sam’s drunken and abusive father, Harry (Richard Marcus), kills his daughter after shoving her down the stairs of their home. Having saved BB’s CPU, Paul decides to attempt an experiment. With the help of Tom, Paul breaks into the hospital, where he then surgically integrates BB’s chip into Sam’s brain, and then steals her body and hides her in his shed. The experiment is a success, as far as her reanimation is concerned. Not only does Sam awaken from the dead, but she remembers Paul—though she appears confused, and her movements are now awkward and “robotic.” She is also mostly unable to speak. Paul’s happiness is short-lived when he realizes Sam cannot easily be switched off—and she then commits the murders of her father and neighbor, Elvira, both clearly as an act of revenge. There are various elements to this story to unpack. Firstly, our categorical distinction between robot and android does not fully suffice, as we are now given a third category of horror: the cyborg. Once Sam is integrated with BB’s CPU, she becomes hybrid, neither fully human nor robot. Instead, she is both human and artificial intelligence, beautiful and terrifying. She has been augmented, which is portrayed through her sudden super-human abilities to overpower (as she does with her father) adults and murder them. However, at the same time she looks dead, with pronounced purple below her eyes and pale skin. She is zombie-like. It is questionable whether she might be rotting or not. (Craven has provoked his [male] audience members with the horror of the abject before; think about the blood running down the thighs of the victimized, and previously sexualized, Phyllis in The Last House on the Left [1972]. With Deadly Friend, Sam remains a love interest even in resurrection, but any sexual liaison with Paul would be a symbol of abjection.) If BB’s CPU (brain) has been integrated into Sam’s, then it is not just that the microchip resurrected her, but that two brains are now powering one body, a body that formerly belonged to a living human. In the view of Craven and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, this dualism cannot exist—at least not in

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harmony (an element of the novel they both emphasize). Therefore, it becomes clear that both beings had their revenge with Sam killing her father and BB killing Elvira because of their dangerous schizophrenia, or to return once again to Kendall, “In Craven’s Deadly Friend, it is the hybrid figure of Sam/BB who embodies the corruption of the film’s plot—corruption of both repressed traumas of abuse and the categorical violation of human and machine [. . .] As with dreams, in Craven’s films technology becomes another mechanism through which our dark memories and fantasies slip into our reality.”10 In one of the strongest moments of the film, Craven implies this violation, or history of sexual abuse, with a nightmare scene in which Sam imagines her father entering her room, yelling, “I can touch you anytime I want,” as she attempts to ward him off. She stabs him with a broken vase, only to find that it now serves as a phallic object protruding from his chest and ejaculating blood onto her body (returning to the abject, one wonders what Kristeva might say about this especially powerful, not to mention subversive, moment in the film). The scene is highly reminiscent of a Krueger-like figure (who attacks his victim, Nancy, most memorably in a bathtub with his glove protruding from between her spread legs), as well as the sexual and spousal violence of characters in The Last House on the Left, but it also gives us insight into the anger of cyborg Sam and her actions. In terms of the violation inherent in reanimation, Paul refuses to accept the death of his two friends, BB and Sam, the latter who conjures in him the kindling of a first love. He also refuses to accept the natural order of things by playing God. In the novel, Henstell alludes to Paul’s (nicknamed Piggy in the novel) over-reliance on scientific thinking, describing him as “merely a straightA student, not overly brilliant, as if only one part of his brain gave off sparks,” and, “If there was anything that interested Piggy almost as little as sports it was history. The past, as far as he was concerned, was sooty, covered in ashes, and though he had heard his mother say often enough, we learn from history, he was bored by the concerns of long ago.”11 And, on God, Paul asks, “Why do you always say God’s green world when God had nothing to do with anything because it’s a silly idea, God, I mean.”12 Paul, in both the film and novel, believes, from a purely scientific point of view, that Sam’s humanity (and her body, which also interests him) can be rebooted with the aid of technology by focusing on her brain. Paul’s dualistic thinking—championing the mind over the body—fails him when the disunity between BB and Sam becomes apparent. Besides the trope of reanimation gone wrong, there is also a form of cyberpunk and a transhumanist vision. For the former, cyberpunk is defined by the OED as a “subgenre of science fiction typified by a bleak, high-tech setting in which a lawless subculture exists within an oppressive society dominated by computer technology.”13 It is a genre often associated with the work of William Gibson and his seminal novel Neuromancer (1984), featuring humans

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who can physically interface with a virtual reality network called the “matrix.” It is through Paul’s character as a brain hacker of a biological, neural network, rather than cyberspace, where we find parallels with cyberpunk. There is no mathematical problem or code that he is unable to crack or apply where necessary to his goals. To Paul, the human brain is no different than a computer’s CPU (transhumanists may hold a similar belief in the computationalism of the mind). Not a popular topic for discussion in the 1980s, the concept of transhumanism became more mainstream in the new millennium by the likes of futurists in popular media and academia. Through the concept of singularity, we have a version of reanimation and immortality through integration and augmentation with technology. Popular futurist and Google employee Ray Kurzweil writes, “I have also set the date 2045 for ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created [. . .] That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are.”14 Paul represents a tech-utopian figure, inspired by the “brilliant adolescents” of parallel films such as Real Genius (Martha Coolidge, 1985), WarGames (John Badham, 1983), and the farcical Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985), but the result of the character’s great mind is a very different story filled with tragic naïveté.15 Craven’s interest in viewing media and technology from a critical standpoint is not relegated to this one moment in Deadly Friend. In 1989’s Shocker, there are clear references to television news-media and the pornography of violence it broadcasts through satellite, when killer-turned-electric-being, Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi), becomes capable of traveling into any home in America via the small screen (a literal ghost in the machine). Craven had the opportunity to revisit his critique of technology with the release of Scream 4 (2011). Having used the telephone as an interface to horror in the first Scream film (1996), Craven in an interview with IndieWire would describe the influence of the transforming digital culture of the early-2000s. He would say: I’d just been noticing it myself. You walk down the street and four out of five people are walking with their heads down. It’s like a science fiction film where everyone has been conquered. Even on the film, you notice it [. . .] When we were filming the final scene at the house there’s this huge porch and everyone is sort of waiting on it and everyone’s heads were over and their faces were glowing with this pale, ghostly light.16 c o n c l u s i o n : c r av e n ’ s m o n s t e r s n e x t d o o r

There will soon be nothing more than self-communicating zombies, whose lone umbilical relay will be their own feedback image—electronic avatars of dead shadows who, beyond death and the river Styx, will

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wander, perpetually passing their time retelling their own story. Just enough of something is still taking place in order to give the retrospective illusion, beyond the end, of reality [. . .] or the illusion of the social, but which is only evoked in a desperate interaction with oneself. —Jean Baudrillard17 In the 1980s, it was difficult to imagine integration with a network in a disembodied form, as the Internet had not ascended to the post-Internet stage, which is to say, when the network moved beyond the binaries of online-offline, with no reliance on physical boundaries like a wired phone line or ethernet connection, and our social-political lives became tethered to the social networking systems. The 80s was a time before the amorphous metaphysics of cloud computing and Wi-Fi access. Therefore, one could best imagine the cyborg—half human-half machine, still bodily and reliant on fluid, and visually anthropomorphic—as a new kind of monster. Clearly, Craven, though he originally sought out a PG retelling of the novel, found common interest in these elements of crossing dangerous borders with the monstrous cyborg, nightmares, and bloody themes of abjection and revenge in the context of a nascent digital culture. For example, in the novel, Henstell often describes the mysterious, yellowy bodily fluid that excretes from cyborg Sam’s eyes, and the stench of death that follows her, filling Paul’s house with her abject presence. Mysteriously, while she appears to be gaining more strength than an elevenyear-old should have, it is implied that she also rots. The two conditions seem

Figure 8.3  Despite a promising young cast (including Kristy Swanson, pictured), Deadly Friend was not a critical or commercial success

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in contradiction and yet they appear true. Even after Paul bathes her, sprays her with perfume, and burns candles, she continues to stink up the house. It is as if she rots from the inside but her wounds also heal. With such grotesques and distinctly abject/feminine horrors being an important aspect of the novel, it is a wonder that Craven and screenwriter Rubin’s original impulse was to soften the story, only to later give in to the studio’s demands for what the audience of the time may have believed to be more Craven, i.e. nightmares and gore. But what Deadly Friend provided Craven with was an opportunity to expand his repertoire, by focusing on a child’s story, where the adults (Mr. Pringle and Elvira) are the monsters, rather than the monster (the cyborg) itself—a common Craven theme I will refer to as “monsters next door.” Cyborg Sam has been wronged, abused, and murdered as a human and destroyed as a robot, so together they exact their revenge on the cruel father and neighbor. Certainly, we are meant to sympathize with this confused and angry cyborg. The monsters next door had already been a part of Craven’s previous narratives: in A Nightmare on Elm Street it is famously revealed that the evil is caused by the sins and secrets of the neighborhood. The Elm Street parents murdered Freddy Krueger, who himself had killed many of the neighborhood children and escaped justice. This act of revenge by the parents gave rise to the haunting of their own teenagers (sins of the father, we might say). While before that, in The Last House on the Left, we are presented with a vicious culture clash between the suburban middle-class life of the Collingwoods and a group of sadistic escaped convicts who killed their seventeen-year-old daughter. This too ends in a violent act of revenge when husband and wife transform into vigilantes, briefly believing themselves to be above the law. Later, in films such as The People Under the Stairs (1991), the dark secrets of wealthy landlords are laid bare as the film “points out, the gap between rich and poor has widened because of the 1980s economics and the greed of an upper-middle class who sees, as Wendy Robie remarks in the film, ‘no community here’.”18 And of course, the famous reveal that the killers of Scream are high school friends, with the lead killer having been triggered by the infidelity of his father and abandonment by his mother. The monsters next door are clearly emphasized in Henstell’s novel as well, so Craven and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin were correct to find monsters among the adults, and amid a story of the loneliness and longing of a young boy. In the novel, Paul is far from confident and popular. Instead, he is a chubby (hence the nickname “Piggy”), lonely, thirteen-year-old genius, who along with his self-built robot friend, BB (BeeBee in the novel), attempts to acclimate himself to a new, small town, after suddenly moving from Boston with his mother following the breakup of her marriage and a dangerous lab accident involving Piggy—which resulted in the death of a bully, Bertram Lennard, whose burned corpse haunts Piggy’s waking and sleeping hours. Alone together, the three cope with being outsiders among their neighbors.

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Paul is filled with love and adoration for his robot friend, who “wasn’t just a toy, nor was he simply an ‘achievement.’ He was in many ways an act of love, a giving of life.”19 Meanwhile, BB’s presence and what he represents, whether Piggy’s intelligence or he and his family’s Otherness, is clearly disconcerting to the residents of Welling. Jeannie wonders: “Poor lovable Bee inspired some illogical fear that the townspeople could neither articulate nor let alone. They picked at their fear like a scab. But fear of what? A glimpse, perhaps, of the twenty-first century when they might be superfluous? It was, she supposed, too much for most people to extend kindness to mechanical beings when they barely treated each other with dignity and caring.”20 Mostly, without a personality, BB becomes a symbol for a human friendship that Paul lacks, or, perhaps, it is that his abusive neighbors are less human to him than BB. The themes that Craven rightly attempted to home in on are Paul’s need for friendship and love. In Deadly Friend the vision is that technology may act as an interface for our longing for deep friendships and connection. Henstell emphasizes the monsters of the residents of Welling, who immediately distrust the outsider family of Paul and Jeannie, and especially their robot. As Jeannie explains to a perturbed store manager, “One day [. . .] one day robots like Bee will be doing your unpacking, stock checking, stacking the cans [. . .] Oh, I don’t know, lots of things. You just wait and see, robotics is the wave of the future,” and Paul “knew with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that he’d always be a stranger here. Worse, he’d always be different, people would continue to watch him as though they were looking through the wrong end of a telescope and he was something unrecognizable on the other side.”21 The citizens of Welling stare and hate the strangeness that Paul and BB represent, and it is only at the point after the destruction of the robot by a crazed, drunken, hateful Harry Pringle (another significant difference with the film) that Paul notes the change of his classmates. Paul mistakes their condolences as empathy, but misery loves company. Without BB he could be the same as everyone else (part of the network). And what can Paul, or others like him who feel trapped in a small world, do? As an outsider he can only hope that through technology he might be able to find solace and connection. Is there a way to escape the small-town darkness of these hateful neighbors—trapped by geography and physical borders? The Internet used to market itself on this escape, but now we can’t hide from our neighbors on the network either (witness the rise of online bullying). Interestingly, in 2006, Craven was slated to write and direct the remake of the Japanese film Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001), which was ultimately scripted by Ray Wright and directed by Jim Sonzero, and released as Pulse. In many ways, the film could have been Craven’s update on Deadly Friend’s (or even Shocker’s) critical vision of technology, but one now immersed in Internet technology, with cellular phones acting as a kind of bodily extension instead

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(a new type of cyborg). Attaching the Pulse project to Craven made sense. It was a contemporary ghost story, about hauntings and digital contagion which caused users to commit suicide. It is unfortunate that Craven’s vision was not realized, but it provides a valuable link back to his oft dismissed but arguably important work on Deadly Friend. With Deadly Friend, Craven presents us with a particular vision of the relationship between society and technology worth revisiting, at the very least to see where these expectations and failures are nearly four decades later. What we find in Craven’s Deadly Friend is a critique of the fascination with robotics and the cyborg, both as a support system (friend, pet, or butler) and as something more evolutionary (the cyborg or the transhuman). The warning is clear: without ethics and morality, engineering the new human, entangling with technology, or toying with reanimation may lead to a transgression of disastrous effects. In such a stage of integration, we may find ourselves less than human after all. All these years later, the promises of smart robotics, whether as household items or something more complex, like AI, are deferred. Instead, our household robot is the Roomba, whose existence is simply a step up from remote controlled toy cars, or an insect, and call and response smart home software. However, in some warped way, we find our identities algorithmicized and consumed by the network. At least Sam knew she was a cyborg. notes   1. Michel De Montaigne, Selected Essays, trans. Charles Cotton (Ann Arbor, Mi: Borders Classics, 2004), 99.   2. The novel was originally published in 1985 and later renamed Deadly Friend to capitalize on the film’s release. Craven, who was interested in the novel’s childhood love story, and the film Starman (1984), describes how after five weeks into the shoot Warner Bros. “realized who I was and told me not to be inhibited by what they told me in the past [. . .] So in the last week of shooting, I made up one little nightmare scene and put it into the film. It was the big hit of the screening. So, then, they came to me and said well, listen, what we need is more of that stuff. What we’re doing is adding to the deaths of a few people, a jump for the beginning, a new closing scene, and two nightmares—that sort of Wes Craven touch,” John Wooley, Wes Craven: The Man and His Nightmares (Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley, 2011), 140–1. For more on Craven’s personal and professional difficulties during the filming of Deadly Friend, see John Kenneth Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 127.   3. Though the term “cyberpunk” originated earlier, William Gibson’s Neuromancer was published in 1984 and popularized the genre and the concept of human integration within a network. Gibson also coined the term “cyberspace” in the 1980s, which would be adopted by users to describe the World Wide Web.   4. Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 97–8.

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  5. John G. Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: How Children Grow up in a Digital Age (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016), Chapter 1, Kindle.   6. Phillips, Dark Directions, 104.   7. Dimitris Vardoulakis, “The Return of Negation: The Doppelgänger in Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’,” SubStance (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2006), 100. Accessed December 7, 2022. Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4152886.   8. It’s worth noting the quasi-mystical aspect of robot Johnny 5’s transformation. Beginning as a military robot, Johnny 5 is struck by lightning, afterwards achieving a sentience and friendly personality. This resembles the popular imagery of lightning powering Dr. Frankenstein’s system, which reanimated his Monster. As far as Making Mr. Right, starring John Malkovich both as scientist Jeff Peters and the android made in his image, named Ulysses, we are confronted with the possibility that an android can be a better lover.   9. Nick Vadala, “Sico, the ‘Rocky IV’ Robot, was Designed to Treat Autism in Children— not get Paulie Beers,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (Mar 27, 2014). Accessed March 24, 2022. Available from: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/entertainment/movies/Sicothe-Rocky-IV-robot-was-designed-to-treat-autism-in-childrennot-get-Paulie-beers.html. 10. Phillips, Dark Directions, 102–3. 11. Diana Henstell, Deadly Friend (London: Bantam, 1986), Chapter 2, Kindle. 12. Ibid., Chapter 1. 13. Oxford Engish Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “cyberpunk.” 14. Christianna Reedy, “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045: Get Ready for Humanity 2.0. Futurism,” Futurism (October 5, 2017). Accessed March 23, 2022. Available from: https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-willhappen-by-2045. 15. Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, 126. 16. Drew Taylor, “Interview: Wes Craven Says the Changing Pace of Technology Attracted him to ‘Scream 4’,” IndieWire, (October. 7, 2011). Accessed March 27, 2022. Available from: https://www.indiewire.com/2011/10/interview-wes-craven-says-the-changingpace-of-technology-attracted-him-to-scream-4-115917/. 17. Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis: Preceeded by Dust Breeding (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2011), 31. 18. Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, 168. 19. Henstell, Deadly Friend, Chapter 2. 20. Henstell, Deadly Friend, Chapter 7. 21. Henstell, Deadly Friend, Chapter 7 and Chapter 4.

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part iii

“Craven” in the Mainstream— the “Hollywood” Nightmares of Wes Craven

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chapter

9

Self-fulfilling Prophecies and Metaphysical Chastisement in The Serpent and the Rainbow James Kloda

W

riting about the film this chapter focuses on, John Kenneth Muir states, “When viewed in the context of Craven’s film career, The Serpent and The Rainbow is a bit of an anomaly as it does not focus either on the American middle class or the destruction of the family.”1 How right he was. A thematic break from Craven’s earlier work but also arguably a stylistic shift, the film is kinetic and vibrant with the aesthetics of third world adventure and intrigue, at a time in which America’s own geopolitical location and lineage was rarely addressed or discussed in the mainstream arena The opening alone is worth summarizing for its nightmarish provocation. The screen floods with red. The image pulls out of this saturation to reveal it is the painted membrane of a coffin. The camera swirls round the casket as it is tended to by a dockside worker, polishing its lid, preparing it for use. A caption informs the setting: “Haiti, 1978.” A tall, threatening figure sporting a gun intercepts the coffin and takes it for his own, his men carrying it off on a boat further down the coast. That evening, the figure re-emerges with a torch and a firearm, perhaps a militarized manifestation of the popular voodoo bogeyman, the incarnation of death. He leads a procession at which the coffin is the main attraction. It is set on fire and paraded through the streets, beneath a large billboard featuring the visages of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), then Haitian President in 1978, before being dumped outside a building. A hospital. Inside, a patient has just been declared dead. When he is subsequently buried, the interred camera records a tear coursing down his cheek, his eyes twitching slowly open. Screen douses black. Bookended by the coffin, the movement of the opening section of Wes Craven’s 1988 film could be seen as a cyclical one, a metaphysical lurch that

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Figure 9.1  The Serpent and the Rainbow continues Craven’s presentation of nightmarish dream sequences

swirls amongst a funerary ritual, culminating with a cremation and then a return to earth. It is an out-of-body experience that does not return to the anatomy but stays proximate, an interred camera and an interred man, both conscious, both watching. From red to black, lifeblood to the colour of night, the void, albeit one teeming with restlessness. The colors of the Haitian flag during the First Empire, after the republic secured its independence from France. The Serpent and The Rainbow is an anomaly, but not in the way Muir asserts. It deals very much with an American middle class, albeit an intellectual and corporate one, and destruction is at its core, but structural as opposed to familial. Where the film might be considered a departure is in its “very strong political element” in the words of its director.2 Inspired by the ethnographic study of Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis and produced by a major studio, Universal Pictures, The Serpent and The Rainbow was not only Craven’s first motion picture shot on location outside America (indeed, the first US film to be filmed in Haiti, before the September 1988 coup d’état against Henri Namphy’s interim government forced the production to relocate to the Dominican Republic) but marked his largest-scale project to date. Davis is refashioned as Dr. Dennis Alan (played by Bill Pullman), who is sent to the republic to infiltrate the “voodoo scene” and demystify the zombie phenomenon. Seven years on, the patient who was buried in the opening scene,

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Christophe Durand (Conrad Roberts), has seemingly risen from the dead and found his way to a clinic in Port-au-Prince. As a scientist, and funded by an American pharmaceutical company, Alan believes there must be a powerful narcotic substance that can anesthetize its subject to a state of apparent rigor mortis for a prolonged period of time. This becomes his Holy Grail. Craven faced two challenges: adapting an oft-times dry, semi-academic study, with lengthy digressions on Haitian flora, into a horror film, and the expectations around the chosen genre: “I kept running up against this problem people had with the subject matter. As soon as you say ‘voodoo’ or ‘zombie’ people think it’s some old B film –[. . .] At one point they even tried to get Al Pacino, which was insane. Pacino as an anthropologist? Come on!”3 If not played by Pacino, Davis nevertheless styles himself as a cavalier adventurer, an Indiana Jones-type with a PhD in ethnobotany instead of archaeology. For Pullman’s Alan, it is the lure of Big Pharma that lends his episodes of unearthly derring-do such expediency: “A totally new anesthetic that could revolutionize medicine,” says his employer, Cassedy (Paul Guilfoyle). “Forty to fifty thousand lives a year could be saved in the US alone, Doctor. And more worldwide . . . if properly marketed.” And both Davis knew, and Alan knows, how to market themselves as proponents of Stateside machismo to the citizens of a former American-occupied territory: to win the trust of local oungan [vodou priest]4 Louis Mozart (Brent Jennings) after he has sold them an anemic concoction of “zombi poison,” Alan pours a measure into a glass of beer and downs it in one, much to the astonishment of his host. Like Davis before him, to the real-life informant Marcel Pierre, this indication of bravado was a sleight-of-hand trick, the powder deftly replaced with a placebo before the reputed sorcerer’s very eyes. The breezy conceit with which Alan reveals the ploy to his companion on this adventure, local psychiatrist Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson), is indicative not only of Davis/Alan’s initial skepticism at the existence of vodou thaumaturgy, but a latent arrogance regarding the supposed superiority of Western practices over indigenous ones, in this case “magic.” If Davis values an Amazonian hunting knife ubiquitously strapped to his belt to symbolize gung-ho buccaneering, Alan prizes his white cotton shirt, drenched in the sweat produced both by the heat and such fearless exploits as leaping from a hotel balcony when spooked by the shadow of a murderous goon, refusing Duchamp’s offer of fresh laundry.5 Yet, as his journey into Haitian culture deepens, Alan becomes increasingly sultry with the perspiration of fear. Craven deploys a number of genre tactics, including jump-scares through misdirection during a graveyard encounter and various intimate arrangements with creepy-crawlies (snake, tarantula, scorpion) familiar from B-movies set in tropical, “primitive” climes. Yet the one that haunts the movie throughout, and even proclaims itself on the tagline (“Don’t bury me . . . I’m not dead!”), is that which particularly obsessed

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the Victorians—namely the premature burial, itself a term most famous for its association with the macabre story of the same name from Edgar Allan Poe. Davis, in his own writing, quotes a contemporary source to refer to this most horrible of demises: “The difference between trance and death has never been quite understood by the majority of mankind.” This statement perfectly encapsulated the Victorians’ dilemma. At the root of the hysterical fear of premature burial was the fact that physicians recognised, and patients suffered, a number of peculiar conditions characterized by immobility and insensibility, and known variously as trance, catalepsy, cataplexy, and suspended animation.6 These conditions have since been dismissed as clinical diagnoses, with “trance states” falling under hypnosis or anthropological research. Nevertheless, the fear of the premature burial most certainly never ended with the Victorians and Poe’s celebrated prose. In contemporary horror cinema it would be explored not just by Craven, but by his contemporaries such as Lucio Fulci, in City of the Living Dead (Paura nella città dei morti viventi, 1980), George Romero, in Creepshow (1982), and George Sluizer, in The Vanishing (1988). Even more recently was Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010), showing that sometimes the most effective fears are also among the oldest. As the narrative to The Serpent and the Rainbow progresses, Alan becomes increasingly plagued with hallucinations when under the influence of a narcotic or while asleep, trance states administered by an external agent in the former (first a shaman, then an oungan) or self-induced. It is during the sleepstates where Alan experiences the most potent, and esoteric, visions. The first occurs when Duchamp takes him on a pilgrimage to a sacred site: while huddled under a divine mapou tree, he is awoken by a noise and, upon tracing it to its source, confronted by the zombi Christophe brandishing a lantern, a veiled bride next to him. She reaches out and walks towards Alan, cooing rasps and whining squeaks like an unholy, inarticulate infant (the profanely eerie voicework is courtesy of American avant-goth singer Diamanda Galás). Alan tentatively draws back her veil with the inexorable curiosity that accompanies a nightmare to reveal a maggot-strewn, cadaverous head: she pulls her jaw down violently and a serpent lunges out of her mouth, latching its fangs into Alan’s cheeks. He wakes with a start, a stridulous cackle bleeding into the antemeridiem reality. In a scene that could have come from one of the special effects laden sequels to the director’s own A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), this is the hellish initial coupling between scientist and spectral consort. It lingers in the memory for many minutes afterwards and stands as one of the filmmaker’s most effective set pieces.

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A few nights later, at Duchamp’s beach house, Alan has a jolting awakening again, slipping the mosquito net over his face in a movement reminiscent of the one used on the bride’s veil. This is the precursor to the second visitation, a nightmare sequence which concludes with a coffin filled to the brim with blood threatening to engulf him. This particular scene is an unrelenting strafe of suffocating claustrophobia. But where does it originate? The explicit supernatural explanation is that Captain Peytraud (Zakes Mokae), both the commander of the local branch of the Tonton Macoute, the secret police formed during the reign of François Duvalier, and a powerful bokor [black magician], has the ability to launch both himself (“I can be there. Every time you close your eyes.”) and those he has enslaved as zombies into the minds of his enemies. (Unlike one of his better-known American contemporaries, Oliver Stone, who would later helm an uncritical documentary honoring the regime of Fidel Castro [Comandante in 2003], the liberal-minded Craven nonetheless clearly had no misplaced romanticism towards third world authoritarianism, on the “left” or “right.”) As Christophe tells Alan during their first encounter in a graveyard, “He sends me into people’s dreams.” This could hold for the first hallucination, especially given that it is Christophe who brings the zombi bride into the sacred landscape of Alan’s psyche. Yet the second phantasmagoria may originate elsewhere, closer to home. In the original book, one of Davis’s many digressions is a discussion on the evidence that fear can not only make a person psychologically vulnerable but also initiate physiological change, as a possible scientific explanation for psychosomatic death, which was colloquially known as “voodoo death.” This can be due to external forces, citing cases of unwounded soldiers returning from the Western Front in the Great War “inexplicably dying of shock, a medical disorder normally brought about by a critical drop in blood pressure due to excessive bleeding [. . .] [Physicians] suggested that individuals terrified by a magic spell suffered like the soldiers, from an overstimulation of the sympathetic-adrenal system, which led to a form of fatal shock.”7 But it can also be entirely psychogenic: “An individual breaks a social or spiritual code, violates a taboo, or for one reason or another believes himself a victim of putative sorcery.”8 In between the hallucinations, Alan has also committed a most heinous act: grave robbery. He is not only an accomplice, but the primary agent, for it is his desire to obtain Haiti’s mystical “zombi poison,” for Big Pharma, that leads him into a cemetery to find a corpse. Ominously, the cadaver that is taken is the matrimonial carcass from his earlier nightmares. Not only is she removed from hallowed ground, but her remains later desecrated, Alan forced to crush her brittle skull to use as an ingredient. In perpetrating such a crime, the ninetydegree spiral of the camera tilt that accompanies the scene comes to articulate Alan’s downfall: a once-upright man now abased, supine in the face of terrible wrongdoing and exploitation. “Conditioned since childhood to expect disaster,

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he then acts out what amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy.”9 Or, as Robin Wood describes in Return of the Repressed, his famous 1978 essay on horror cinema and dreams, “The conditions under which a dream becomes a nightmare are (a) that the repressed wish is, from the point of view of consciousness, so terrible that it must be repudiated as loathsome, and (b) that it is so strong and powerful as to constitute a serious threat.”10 It is unfortunate that Wood, writing years later, would dismiss Craven’s output in the 1980s based on his disdain for the slasher trend that A Nightmare on Elm Street had helped to mainstream.11 One wonders if he had should have at least engaged with The Serpent and the Rainbow, which could be argued to take his theories of societal nightmares returning to haunt the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate generation and (dis)place them in a territory of even wider historical Empire-building and corruption. b u ry i n g t h e pa s t

Upon waking from his illusory, horrifying tribulation, Alan reaches for the comfort of Duchamp in the bed next to him. Instead, he finds the decapitated body of a Black woman, Christophe’s sister. Officers of the Tonton Macoute burst in and promptly arrest him. He is forced to return home, risking death if he stays, but he begins to miss the Caribbean. Inevitably, then, Alan returns to Haiti, just in time to see the Duvalier regime collapse and to experience his own, agonizing torture—although he will survive. “The nightmare is over,” Alan remarks in voiceover at the film’s end, and indeed it is, for him. But most importantly, if not as explicitly referenced, for the people of Haiti. “I promised the people of Haiti that this film was going to be a fair representation of their country, and that the film would look at voodoo as a well-rounded thing with both a dark and a light side.”12 The Serpent and The Rainbow’s protagonist-victim succumbs to voodoo death but manages to vanquish it through elaborate fantasia. A heroic dawn awaits amidst an alternate social order. Implicitly, it was Dr. Alan’s work that did this. Is it unfair to brush off the action-packed finale of The Serpent and the Rainbow? Particularly given that it features revolution and the prolonged torture of the film’s protagonist—but as “mere” blunt, risible spectacle in an exotic land ala, say, other 1980s “white men in peril” serials such as King Solomon’s Mines (J. Lee Thompson, 1985). For Wood, “escapism” is not necessarily to be sniffed at, indeed it could possess revolutionary potential: “The old tendency to dismiss the Hollywood cinema as escapist always defined escape merely negatively as escape from, but escape logically must also be escape to. Dreams are also escapes, from the unresolved tensions of our lives into fantasies. Yet the fantasies are not meaningless; they can represent attempts to resolve those tensions in more radical ways than our consciousness can countenance.”13

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Figure 9.2  Bill Pullman was becoming an established leading man when he appeared in The Serpent and the Rainbow

Perhaps, then, The Serpent and the Rainbow’s nightmares are just such “unresolved tensions”—another “return of the repressed”—from America’s past colonial activities and the more recent, initial support of despot figures such as François Duvalier during the Cold War, where “my enemy’s enemy” became “my friend.” Robin R. Means Coleman, in Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to the Present, finds contention with the fact that no government or police personnel who are opposed to Dennis’ [appropriation] efforts think of doing away with him through traditional murderous means such as death by machete or shooting him with a pistol—fates that, in the film, befall Haiti’s innocent Black citizenry with swift regularity. Rather Dennis is closely watched, harassed [. . .] tortured, before finally being cajoled to fly back to the States.14 Indeed, even after ignoring the law’s repeated warnings to mind his own business, Alan is hauled in by the Tonton Macoute and finds himself strapped to a torture chair in a dingy chamber. After deriding his boyish good looks (the “pretty white face”) with the threat of disfigurement via blowtorch, his torturer, Peytraud, opts for a different form of mutilation for this red-blooded foreigner—emasculation. Alan offers to buy himself out (“I’m in medical research. There’s a lot of money in it.”) which the commandant rejects, preferring something more authentic, primal—to hear him scream. Using a heavy

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lump hammer, he drives a nail into the American’s scrotum. The image cuts to a corridor with portraits of the Duvaliers at its end, Alan’s howls resounding through the space, cementing their reputation for brutal authoritarianism. The protagonist certainly gets his own comeuppance for refusing to pay heed to the local authority. But, only shortly before this punishment, Alan disinterred a corpse to use as an ingredient for the formula his backers so desire. In disregarding his discipline’s Hippocratic Oath, Alan is shown to compromise his manhood, both ethically and literally. Moreover, it is not like he was not warned: in the first hallucination brought on by a psychotropic substance in the Amazon, a pestilent arm reaches up from the ground and grabs him by the testicles, pulling him painfully into the earth and further down before releasing him, freefall, into a void. This is what to expect if you mess with death. After the ordeal, Alan is deposited in the street outside Duchamp’s house, naked except for a white loincloth smeared with residue from his wound. But he is no martyr: the act of sterilization has physically abased this once upstanding member of the Western scientific community. Prostrated. Humiliated. At least the experience forces Alan to change his shirt. It is not clear whether Davis ever jettisoned the Amazonian knife in his investigation, but the shift in the book is from trying to find scientific explanation for zombification to understanding the clandestine order that not only guards the ritual process but administers its whole procedure, from point of induced paralysis to resurrection and, post-reanimation, palliative care. For people are not chosen at random to become a zombi: how is someone judged to become a victim? Davis summarizes his inquest: “As a Western scientist seeking a folk preparation, I had found myself swept into a complex worldview utterly different from my own and one that left me demonstrating less the chemical basis of a popular belief than the psychological and cultural foundations of a chemical event.”15 Davis comes to reject two common (Western) concepts of the zombi. The first a socio-economic assumption that zombis may have been created for Haiti’s plantation—and landowners, a shuffling, submissive proletariat willing to undertake the most mindless of tasks: “given the availability of cheap labour [in Haiti], there would be no economic incentive to create a force of indentured service.” The second is the notion of the zombi as agent of destruction, a malevolent potential: “given the colonial history, the concept of enslavement implies that the peasant fears, and the zombi suffers, a fate that is literally worse than death [. . .] Critically, [. . .] the fear is not of being harmed by zombis, but rather of becoming one.”16 Both of these cultural suppositions about the function of the zombi hinge on the notion of “evil”: the former a passive victim manipulated for the creation of capital (colonial evil); the latter a malignant actor to subdue a superstitious society (supernatural evil). But the research of Davis comes to a different conclusion about the zombi altogether: “In the vodoun society [zombification] was [. . .] a social sanction imposed

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by recognised corporate groups whose responsibility included the policing of that society. Zombification had always struck me as the most horrible fate. Now [. . .] I realised that it had to be. After all, what form of capital punishment is pleasant?”17 Zombification as collective deterrent, a means of keeping order. Albeit somewhat perversely, a force for good. But what would condemn a subject for such a consummate sanction? One of the protagonist’s informants, the president of a local Bizango [secret society], explains it is “someone [who] has been talking improperly. Perhaps he is the one that runs to the blanc or the upper ups in government and tells them what such and such a society is doing.”18 In the context of Davis’s ethnography, Means Coleman’s interpretation is off-piste, up to a point. The Blacks who assist Alan in his “appropriation efforts” do meet “grotesquely violent deaths,” but, in the code of the Bizango, which preserves local order, they have transgressed and must pay for their loose tongues.19 And the act of corporal punishment is never explicitly shown on-screen, retaining a modicum of discretion, and, crucially, decapitation is swift and final. Merciful. The ultimate, chips-down sentence is meted out to the blanc, for smuggling secrets to foreign interests, the upper-ups of corporate America and Big Pharma. Craven’s adaptation holds interest until the sequence of Alan’s premature burial, both as a self-fulfilling prophecy and metaphysical chastisement. The film perhaps should have ended immersed in his conscious void, the Earth of this land that he has exploited now explicitly holding him down, dominating, terrifying. Craven has, however, offered a form of excuse for the disappointing “feel good” final reel: “I had the entire climax of the film done as a nightmare under the influence of the drug in order to rationalize what the previous screenwriter [Richard Maxwell] had left me with.”20 In her singular monograph Haiti, History and the Gods, the scholar Joan Dayan dispenses with the more traditional discussion of vodou’s African origins, preferring to focus on the complex bedrock of Haitian history to comprehend the praxis of the religion. “I do not treat vodou as an experience of transcendence, an escapist move into dream and frenzy. Instead, I emphasize the intensely intellectual puzzlement, the process of thought working itself through terror that accounts for what I have always recognised as the materiality of vodou practice [. . .] This sense of invention goaded by thought leads me to claim that vodou practices must be viewed as ritual re-enactments of Haiti’s colonial past, even more than as retentions from Africa.”21 Zombification, then, as an ingenious social sanction, goaded through both the potential, and historical memory, of terror. Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti: two histories assimilated on one island. But what of the other cultures that come together? On the one hand, Western capitalism and Haitian traditionalism amidst a postcolonial republic. In the film, the Haitian regime under Duvalier Jr is presented as unambiguously “bad,” Celine castigating its members as “mad dogs” and Duchamp ruefully commenting that, in the

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Figure 9.3  The tropical locations of The Serpent of the Rainbow make it unique among Craven’s films

lack of state funding to make resources available for her clinic, “handcuffs are the only thing Duvalier makes sure Haiti has enough of.” Predominantly remembered for its later barbarous self-indulgence and ruthless corruption, it is worth noting that the Duvalier dynasty began amongst a backlash of the Black majority against the disproportionate influence of a small ruling elite that had monopolized the nation politically and economically since the Haitian revolution of 1791 to 1804. As Davis boils down, “With his success, François Duvalier became the first national leader in almost a hundred years to recognise the legitimacy of the vodoun religion and the rights of the people to practice it [. . .] A year or two before the accession of Duvalier, vodoun drums were still being burned; a year later, a vodoun priest was serving as minister of education.”22 It was rumoured that Duvalier himself was a practicing oungan and Davis records that much of “the Haitian peasantry came to regard Duvalier as the personification of Baron Samedi, a spirit prominently associated with the secret societies.”23 Traditional vodou culture thus integrated with central government, the leaders of the Bizangos became prominent figures in the Tonton Macoute.24 Peytraud, as depicted in Craven’s film, could be one such individual. On the other hand, Means Coleman describes the “repeatedly elaborate[d] . . . distinction between White Science . . . and Black Magic” and the character that fuses the two is the psychologist Marielle Duchamp. 25 The author says, “there is no conflict between my science and my faith [. . .] In Haiti, our god is not just in heaven, he is in our flesh.”26 Beguiled by her sexually charged, whirling-dervish

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dancing when she becomes possessed by Ezili, the lwa [goddess] of love at the tourist ritual, Alan wastes little time to possess her himself. The morning after his first vision of the zombi bride, she takes him to the sacred waterfall and they make love in a cave. There is a fetishized animalism to her movements in the way she arches her back and hungrily probes his mouth with her fingers: as Duchamp reaches climax, the camera slow-motion zooms into her ecstatic face, eroticizing her rapture. Except this has been brought on not by her god, but White sexual agency. Something striking changes in Alan’s hallucinations. When first visited by the undead spouse, she is softly lit in the glowing candlelight from the pilgrims: in the second apparition, post-coital, she is illuminated by white from behind, emphasizing the colour of the matrimonial dress that frames her dark body. A romantic coupling of the flesh becomes mirrored by a phantasmic one: Alan has less possessed her, more appropriated. And what about the system that Alan acts as proxy for? He is not shy to tell potential informants that he “represents rich, powerful interests” yet will haggle them to the bone. He tells Mozart, earnestly, that he wants to use the poison for good, much to the oungan’s disbelief (“My poison can be used in such a way, huh”?), but for the good of whom? The sick or company shareholders? It is this posture of white savior and readiness to dole out influence that makes Peytraud so mistrustful of the American: “This country lives on the edge, Dr. Alan. One weakness in the wrong place and over it goes into slavery again [. . .] The US would like anarchy here, I’m sure. Well, this isn’t Grenada.” Dubois, on the other hand, blames both Davis’s book and Craven’s “transformation [of it] into a horror film” in a decade when “Haitian boat people were blamed for bringing AIDS to the United States” as contributing to the “stereotypical and denigrating portraits of Vodou [that] dominated most public discussions about the religion.”27 Was the director doomed in trying to adapt a text that could not be reimagined without, and indeed perhaps demanded, a “white savior” leading man? Thus, in the end, Alan, a blanc missionary with God on his side, must go and vanquish the Black magician. Coinciding with demonstrations against the primeval Duvalier regime, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. They’d done it in Grenada after all. Our hero, Alan, “saves” his girl from savagery. He will even strap a resurfaced Peytraud, his own torturer, into the same chair, the despot’s flesh further blackened by the inferno that has engulfed him; Alan growls, “I wanna hear you scream!” invoking the institution of cruelty the colonial planters suffered on the slaves of French-owned Saint Domingue. An act of sterilization, consigning him to hell. One of the last moments of colour seen in The Serpent and the Rainbow is the red of a Coca-Cola crate carried across the screen. The locals rejoice: the regime has fallen, and the dictator has fled the country, in part thanks to American influence. (Although one is led to believe that Craven is being cheeky in regard to the Coca-Cola crate—after all, it was the Haitian people who succeeded in regime change,

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and no amount of Western-friendly soundbites from a despot leader was able to stop this.) In conclusion, Craven’s dreamscape fantasia that constitutes the finale can be seen as a rationalization of the unresolved tension that Richard Maxwell had left him with. As he had done most successfully with A Nightmare on Elm Street, he attempted to resolve these challenges in more provocative ways than both his characters, and his own, consciousnesses would possibly allow. Yet Freddy Krueger had propelled him into touching distance of the A-list. He was now part of something bigger—the “universal something,” with all its hegemony, ideology, and need to secure legitimacy. As a modern horror film, there is no doubt that The Serpent and The Rainbow is an intriguing and important one. Aside from the notorious Goodbye Uncle Tom (Addio Zio Tom, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1971), no modern horror film had used (or attempted to use) the landscapes of Haiti to macabre effect—and here we see Craven walking upon his own country’s old haunts, his camera capturing a society in transition. Moreover, few genre undertakings were interested, during the 80s, in looking outside of America’s “rural,” “suburban,” or “scientific” nightmares—and even An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981) retains its fish-out-of-water “horror” within similar developed, if not even familiar, lands. With The Serpent and the Rainbow, Craven provoked his audience to consider the wider world outside the Anglosphere for a macabre showdown—and signaled to his contemporaries that horror, nightmares, know no borders. He was never afraid to adapt, to look outside. In its most effective sequences, The Serpent and the Rainbow encapsulates Dayan’s admiration of vodou as being “thought working itself through terror.” Yet, in the final act, where the white man can finally be redeemed, despite his gross vandalism of foreign lands, it can be argued to fall short. Craven tried his best to escape to an oneiric, radical plain, but perhaps found it also impossible to escape from the system that had appropriated him—that of the Hollywood “happy ending.” notes   1. John Kenneth Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 1998), 144.   2. In Brian J. Robb, Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven (London: Titan Books, 1998), 126.   3. Ibid., 128.   4. At this point, it will be useful to discuss Haitian terminology and consider a different orthography, to provide distance from Western assumption. Davis notes that, “as a result of the sensational and inaccurate interpretations in the media, Hollywood in particular, the word voodoo has come to represent a fantasy of black magic and sorcery” and opts for the terms vodoun and zombi. In Wade Davis, The Serpent and The Rainbow (London: Collins,

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1986), 11. However, since Davis’s account was published, as the scholar Laurent Dubois summarizes in his article Vodou and History, “a new wave of scholarship has incited a change in terminology—the traditional ‘Voodoo’ [. . .] has ceded (with various detours through ‘Vodoun’ and ‘Voudoun’) to the now canonical ‘Vodou’, which is used both because it is closer to the Creole pronunciation of the word and as a way of distinguishing the religion from the stereotypes that have haunted it.” See, for instance, Laurent Dubois, “Vodou and History.” Comparative Studies in Society and History (Vol. 43, No. 1, 2001), 93. Thus, I will adopt this practice except in citation.   5. Ibid., 97, for the story of “the knife.”   6. Ibid., 134.   7. Ibid., 137.   8. Ibid., 136.   9. Ibid. 10. Robin Wood, “Return of the Repressed,” Film Comment (Vol. 14, No. 4, July–August 1978), 26. 11. See: Robin Wood, “What Lies Beneath?” in Steven Jay Schneider, Horror Film and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Whilst Wood does note his disappointment at A Nightmare on Elm Street in this essay, he does not reference Craven’s other work despite discussing his dislike of 1980s horror. 12. Craven cit. in Marc Shapiro, “Craven’s Latest,” Fangoria (No. 107), 9. 13. Wood, 26. 14. Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2011), 156. 15. Davis, 275. 16. Ibid., 139. 17. Ibid., 213. 18. Ibid., 237. 19. Means Coleman, 156. 20. cit. in Robb, 126. 21. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xvii. 22. Davis, 256. 23. Ibid., 257. 24. It is worth noting that the name comes from a Haitian peasant folktale that warns children that their Tonton [uncle] will carry them off in his macoute [burlap sack] if they are disobedient. 25. Means Coleman, 156. 26. Ibid. 27. Dubois, 92.

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chapter

10

Death is Not the End: Electric Dreams and Mass Media Manipulation in Wes Craven’s Shocker Melody Blackmore

W

es Craven’s films have always dealt with a whole manner of pioneering themes; blurred realities, nightmarish villains, and grotesque fears, yet his cinematic influence on dream worlds, maniacal killers, and media, or generational trauma and death, indicate how this was a director with a unique perspective. This chapter’s analysis of Shocker (1989) will focus upon the return of the dead as something atypical. Often the dead come back in films as zombies; Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968), Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979), Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004), Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009), and so on. Craven’s writings transcend the familiar dead-return-as-zombies trope, and he accomplishes something else in Shocker—vengeance and a (literally) electrifying villain as an embodiment of societal fears. Shocker had to be developed from another idea. Craven originally wanted to make a television series about the experience of serial killers—in fact he gained further inspiration reading a book “which said that when people watch television, they have brainwaves almost identical to those when dreaming.”1 Craven decided that the television and the dream world run parallel with one another, because both allow characters and spectators to enter another universe. The studio, however, rejected Craven’s idea of what was dubbed “Dream Stalker” because it was deemed too controversial and according to the director, “Fox had problems with it. They thought it would have been too violent, too negative, too difficult for the audience to know and identify with the killer.”2 The original concept of a protagonist working with their abilities in order to catch a murderer through a dream or psychic skill has since become a popular basis for television series, such as the CBS hits Ghost Whisperer (2005–10) or Medium (2005–11).3 Craven’s own childhood was itself restricted within his strict fundamentalist community. Even watching films was considered sinful and this

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fear of betraying his Christian upbringing was used to breed guilt, and according to Craven it caused him to finally sneak into the cinema to see To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962).4 Being raised in a strict Baptist family, the effects of the community restrictions and power no doubt influenced his writings. Craven’s fascination with fear, technology, control, and community power can be seen in his films, with several of them themed around familial issues and patriarchy. These include Shocker (1989) and its use of possession over others, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and its use of generational fear and an attempt to “protect” one’s dreams from a figure of male (sexual) abuse, and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), which provides audiences with a monstrous “Other” threatening the stable American family unit. Craven’s childhood had shown him the dangers of societal repression and of families trying to keep the darkness out. Beginning with a discussion on dreams and the unconscious link between protagonist and killer before examining the father and son relationship, this chapter also analyses the return from death as being an electrical energy symbolic of the return of the repressed. The rest of this contribution focuses upon discussions centering around Shocker’s use of televisions and violent media to depict cultural concerns, at the time, around media manipulation. These themes, found in the film, are all part of Craven’s ability to create an “undead return” as something different, and possibly even more meaningful, from what had become, at the time, a seemingly exhausted zombie trope (and had become a topic of satire with the success of Re-animator [Stuart Gordon, 1985] and Return of the Living Dead [Dan O’Bannon, 1985]). Wes Craven went on to direct the popular teen slasher Scream (1996), and its first three sequels, which have become well-known for their metaawareness of popular culture totems. Craven’s work often knowingly mirrors cultural fears of the times, and in the case of Shocker it was the decade’s concerns surrounding technological changes, “video nasties” (which the filmmaker had been caught up in),5 and the general media influence upon an upcoming generation. Shocker was produced by Alive Films (They Live [John Carpenter, 1988]), and has three acts. The first act introduces a news report, showing a victim being pulled away on a stretcher having been murdered by a serial killer. The accompanying television report explains how the suspected killer has already murdered over thirty people and still remains on the loose in Los Angeles. The prime suspect is a TV repair man called Horace Pinker (Mitch Pileggi). Lieutenant Don Parker (Michael Murphy) is hunting down Pinker and gets close to finding where he is—too close for the liking of Pinker, who finds the investigator’s home and murders his wife and two foster children. The elder foster son—a college student, Jonathan (Peter Berg)—is asleep and sees what Pinker does in his dream, showing there is a mysterious connection between the two. Jonathan’s visions are used to help lead the police to Pinker’s place of work, and after a shootout at the

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Figure 10.1  Mitch Pileggi’s Horace Pinker was seen as an attempt at a “new” Freddy Krueger-type franchise character

repair man’s workshop, the suspect manages to escape and targets Jonathan’s girlfriend Alison (Camille Cooper) in revenge. Eventually Jonathan’s dream leads the police once again to Pinker, who is in the process of kidnapping someone. Pinker is arrested and sentenced to the electric chair. Before his execution, Pinker makes a demonic deal to return from the dead, ensuring his transcendence of death. At the execution he reveals that Jonathan is his son, before being “executed” in a lengthy and grueling scene. The second act of the film takes place immediately after Pinker’s passing— but he has changed into an electrical being and can now navigate space and place in his new form. Pinker is also now able to possess others and continues his murder spree. This section of the film follows Jonathan and Lt. Parker as they attempt, without success, to stop the now-supernatural killer. The final act of the film sees Jonathan and friends trap Pinker in the television long enough for the power to be turned off at the city’s main power station in a bid to trap him inside his own “technological nightmare” permanently. The ghost of Alison returns to let Jonathan know that the necklace he gave her before she died, lost in the bottom of a lake, is the key to trapping Pinker (this sign of “love” will apparently expose his vulnerability). After Jonathan retrieves this, he succeeds with his new plan, and a chase sequence ensues in which Jonathan uses the remote control to change the channels with Pinker inside a number of changing programmes and films. The power is finally disabled by Jonathan’s friends, and Pinker appears, possibly gone forever . . .

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dreams

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.6 Dream states are sometimes used as metaphors in films,7 and in the case of Shocker this might be read as a way of mediating wider themes of media, technology, and “watching.” Jonathan’s dreams psychically link him to Pinker as he witnesses murder through the eyes of the killer. According to Geggel,8 dreams of murder mirror a person’s anxieties or desires. Jonathan’s dreams symbolize his connection to, and repulsion of, Pinker, his biological father, whom he cannot turn away from but concurrently rejects.9 Shocker thus offers an unconscious world, Jonathan’s “dream state,” to confront him with the monstrous and setup the main narrative conflict. To quote Freud: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”10 The blurred threshold between dreams and reality, and the living and the dead, in Shocker become even more apparent with his girlfriend Alison’s spirit and her connection to the water with her disposed necklace. She appears, ghostly, soaked in water to Jonathan, telling him that her necklace is at the bottom of the lake, the key to defeating Pinker. Purrington states: “The lake is the valley of the unconscious.”11 The connection between dreams, water, and the unconscious allow Craven to use Alison as a link between the “real” and the “dream” world. In 1951, Donald Winnicott coined the term “Transitional Object” to describe the omnipotent objects that bring special meaning and integral significance to a child’s life. This could be a person, a toy, a blanket, a place, or as seen in this film, a piece of jewelry. As a transitional object, Alison’s necklace not only aids Jonathan in the quest to defeat Pinker, but it also defends him against attack. A transitional object enables metastasis to occur between reality and fantasy, inner and outer worlds, or metaphorically, the living and the dead. Placed in a watery limbo, this final gift to his girlfriend becomes embodied with the power to end Jonathan’s torment—it is symbolic of the power of future, hope, love, innocence, youth: there may emerge some thing or some phenomenon perhaps a bundle of wool or the corner of a blanket or eiderdown, or a word or tune, or a mannerism—that becomes vitally important to the infant for use at the time of going to sleep, it is a defence against anxiety [. . .] this then becomes a transitional object.12 Themes of dreams, evil supernatural killers, and terrified teens are nothing new to Wes Craven, of course. Shocker’s use of dreams and otherworldly realities make it easily comparable to its iconic predecessor, A Nightmare on

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Elm Street. Both Shocker and A Nightmare on Elm Street have similarities: the maniacal killer who, once dead, returns supernaturally and seeks revenge. In addition, both link dreams with the killer and involve overlapping realities with images and locations of slumber. With Jonathan psychically projecting when he is asleep, he can pre-empt what is about to happen in the Shocker narrative. As Freud states, “The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”13 Knowing Craven’s background in the humanities as an academic, and fondness for Freud (even going so far as to reference the philosopher in the dialogue of The Last House on the Left [1972]), we can imagine that the director is indicating that Jonathan also unconsciously desires to be bad, to be like his father, and to murder, which—at least initially—provides Craven’s film with a subtle nightmarish tension. Certainly, a recurring interest for the director has been how familial trauma is passed on—be it in his early work such as The Last House on the Left through to the first two Scream sequels, or his underrated My Soul to Take (2010). l i k e fa t h e r , l i k e s o n

At his execution, Pinker reveals that he is the biological father to Jonathan, bringing clarity as to the connection between them both. As established, films, including those of Craven (see the aforementioned My Soul to Take), will often use this familial link to explain psychic links—a device that gives both protagonists and the viewers information that normally would not be easily accessible. The bad, dark father figure has played a fundamental role in many of Craven’s previous films: Krug in The Last House on the Left; Incubus in Deadly Blessing (1981); Papa Jupiter in The Hills Have Eyes; Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street; and Pinker in Shocker. The parallel between Shocker and A Nightmare on Elm Street14 is also made clear in the father figures that both films portray. Attesting to similarities between the films, both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker have a dark, evil father role and a good “father of the law” — Nancy’s “good” father in the “real world” is police chief Thompson, who has tried to kill “evil” Freddy Krueger, the bad father figure who torments the teenager in the “unreal world” of her sleep. In contrast, Jonathan’s good father in Shocker is police Lt. Don Parker and the bad father is Pinker. This trope of good father/bad father has long been established in cinema, with films such as Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) depicting Darth Vader as Luke Skywalker’s bad father and Obi Wan Kenobi as the good father figure.15 Psychoanalytically, Lacan16 depicted this role as “Father of the Law” or “Name of the Father,” which is a symbolic role that the father takes to prevent any desire or perversion and bring law to the household. Such figures also, thus, signify absence and repression (in the aforementioned film they are suitably desexualized). When it

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comes to the bad father figure, a collaboration between Freud and Jung termed this as the “Negative Father Complex.”17 Modern culture has symbolically lost the father because there has been a transition over the years to remove, or at least oppose, elements of patriarchal authority in Western societies. The reappearance of such formation would, arguably, signify a regression—giving us a negative, evil, fearsome, and wholly bad father—in this case Pinker. If capital punishment, abolished in most developed nations, represents a lineage to the dated patriarchal past, then Craven presents Pinker as a character able to manipulate such inhumanity for his own gruesome benefit. The “bad” father returning, to punish society further, via an outdated form of punishment. Pinker reveals to Jonathan that the reason he walks with a limp is because, as a child, Jonathan shot him in the knee as he tried to protect his mother from being killed. Pinker says “such a big gun just blastin’ away at your daddy with murder in your eyes. Like Father like son huh?” There is a collective fear18 that if parents are not good, or if they are violent, that the trauma this could bring upon the children is that they themselves may become as dangerous as their parents. This could be from either inherited genes or from the environment of the child, yet the societal fear remains that violent fathers can raise violent children (hence the debate around “video nasties” in the UK and the access for underage viewers to material that could disturb them).19 Alongside this cultural angst, Shocker also reflects the generational concern that our children suffer as a result of the previous generations’ misdoings. As A Nightmare on Elm Street depicted children suffering for the vengeful things their parents did to Freddy Krueger, as an expression of this generational-consequence fear, Shocker provokes the same unease—that exposure to “bad” media and growing up in such a visually violent world will risk the next generation being exposed to the consequences of such interaction. Despite this doomed outlook, Shocker provides hope by way of Jonathan rebutting his father’s influence— just as Luke Skywalker did with Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983). At the end of the film, Jonathan has the opportunity to kill Pinker, but he says “It’s not my style,” to which Pinker replies “It is your style. You’re a chip off the old block, like it or not.” This dialogue and action signify that whilst Jonathan has no choice but to be the son of Pinker, he still has a choice as to whether or not he should seek revenge, something the state refuses with their use of the electric chair. deals with the devil

Existence didn’t end for Al when he was burned by his treacherous comrades. At the moment of his death, he made a pact he’d later barely recall [. . .] he was returned to Earth [. . .] bound to a symbolic uniform and infused with hell-born energy.20

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Before Pinker is taken from his cell to be executed, he summons a television demon and makes a deal to return from the dead. By invoking this rite, Pinker transcends his own execution and becomes an undead electrical form. The trope of someone making a “deal with the devil” is of course nothing new and Shocker appears to use it all too quickly as an explanation as to how Pinker will become part of the undead. Perhaps Shocker was inspired by the formula seen in the hit film Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988), in which serial killer Charles Lee Ray uses a voodoo ritual to return from the dead, as a soul or a consciousness that embodies a nearby doll. These devilish exchanges are a form of “Faustian Bargain” that are used as a way for a character to communicate with the supernatural in order to get something they want or need. The legend of Faust began with German folklore, in which Faust was told to have agreed to surrender his soul to Satan in exchange for knowledge and magical powers. Robert Kurtzman’s Wishmaster (1997) and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) both use ancient deals with evil in a bid to achieve pleasure and power. Psychoanalytically this is seen as a self-sacrifice in exchange for psychical survival—to abandon the self for the false self. Shocker uses Pinker’s deal to ensure that he returns not just as a man but something else entirely and it is the electrical form that is representative of both his psychical survival and his consciousness surviving. Faustian bargains often involve redeeming the self for a different and more powerful omnipotent self, offering a form of psychic retreat from living in reality. Metaphorically they are normally used to condemn characters for having collaborated with evil—The Mummy (Stephen Sommers,

Figure 10.2  Mitch Pileggi would achieve broader fame after Shocker failed at the box office

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1999), for instance, shows that those who betrayed others in order to side with the evil undead Imhotep suffer dire consequences for their betrayal and greed. In Shocker, however, Pinker simply does not want to die because he does not want his killing to end, nor perhaps does he wish for his revenge against his son’s family and friends to conclude. electricity

Electricity is energy—it enables us to live or die. Our bodies and our brains make use of electricity to survive and our everyday lives rely on its use— watching television, lighting our homes, using our phones, and even the advent of electric cars. Yet, electricity is also dangerous and deadly. We are all told from our formative years not to put our fingers in a plug socket or to stick a metal knife in the toaster or to have electrical devices near the bath water. It can destroy us, it is both nature (lightning) and man-made (electrocution). It was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that told the infamous story of scientist Victor Frankenstein, who creates a creature from dead body parts and brings it to life by using powerful electrical impulses. Electricity creates life in this story, but in the form of monstrosity. It is part of nature, outside of human control, and something that for centuries societies have attempted to control and even transition into forms of escapism (arcade machines, fairground rides, et cetera). Moreover, of course, without electricity we would not see as much violence, because there would be no cinema, no television, no VHS . . . The 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler, its title based on the phrase coined by Oxford Philosopher Gilbert Ryle, is a common idiom used to describe cartesian dualism of the body and mind made popular by Descartes.21 The idea that we can exist separately from the body and brain as consciousness has since entered many popular films over recent years, including Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014), in which a woman becomes a form of evolved consciousness capable of entering technology and controlling it. Pinker’s consciousness becomes separate from his dead body and can move into people and other objects in order to control them. The 1993 film from Rachel Talalay, The Ghost in the Machine, tells the story of the fearsome “Address Book Killer”, who, having been injured in a car crash, dies whilst having an MRI during an electrical storm. The computer extracts his soul and enables him to become a murderous computer system able to control technological devices and use them as weapons to kill. This Cartesian concept also takes place within Shocker, in that even when the body is gone, the mind can live on. The belief in dualism usually brings humanity hope—that death is not the end, and we can still exist despite our bodies no longer being of use. Yet Wes Craven takes this “hope” and turns it into something fearful, as we see Pinker’s consciousness

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transcend into another form, becoming able to continue killing by controlling others. Metaphorically, Pinker may also be seen as the perverse embodiment of media, with its ability to shape minds (including its reporting the grisly details of his crimes and then his trial and death), as demonstrated through the film’s Cartesian use of the killer’s ability to manipulate and possess the minds of others, usually those who, at least tangentially, celebrated his demise. Hence, even in his “passing,” he becomes immortalised—just as happened with the more famous of the serial killers via continued media coverage and retrospectives (the Manson Family, Ted Bundy, et al.). return of the repressed

Horror-slashers such as Shocker often depict their monstrous antagonists in terms of them being representative of “the return of the repressed.”22 Freud mentions how someone’s “uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.”23 The 1980s horror arena was firmly locked into a formulaic loop and repetition of killer tropes, with sequels to Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham, 1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) headlining this era, but it also inspired a growth in analysis and critical works on the genre.24 Monstrous killers are often now seen as a physical embodiment of repression, and they signify an uncanny return as they come back repeatedly from the dead (Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, et al.). The uncanny, for Freud, was derived from the term “Heimlich” meaning homely and familiar, and its opposite term “Unheimlich” would mean concealed, hidden and, inevitably, unhomely. On the matter of returning from the dead, as being symbolic to an “uncanny return,” Freud thought “To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts.”25 Like Freud, Wood’s famous essay “The Return of the Repressed”26 describes horror as the embodiment of reticent desires and suppressed fears, and these forms of constrained forces return through our screens as monsters. The dead returning in films is an “old idea that whoever dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent on carrying him off with him to share his new existence.”27 However, Pinker returns not only as a killer, but as the Parker family’s enemy. The concealed secrets of Jonathan’s true inheritance, his biological father, and his family history were kept, repressed, and Pinker brings this out into the open—literally broadcasting their father-son conflict into viewers’ living rooms during the film’s final act. Hence, Pinker’s monstrousness also involves turning the private into the public—prophetic for how “reality” media (such as the phenomnon of Jerry Springer) might invade our daily televisual diets.

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media manipulation

As has been explained, a fundamental aspect to this film is the role of television, both as a physical space for Pinker to run to and become trapped within, and metaphorically as a tool to represent cultural fears about television itself and its ability to infiltrate our minds. Prior to Shocker being released, David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome sent a powerful message when it came to the power of media and its influence on our unconsciousness. The film delivers a cautionary tale on technology at the height of the 1980s VHS era. Videodrome provoked the boundaries of so-called “video violence” as we follow cable television president Max Renn (James Woods) peddling his company’s lowbudget pornographic shoots and on the search for his next big financial deal. He is offered “Videodrome,” a subterranean signal, rumoured to emanate from Malaysia (hence its monstrousness belongs to “the Other” on another continent, no less), whereby participants become victims of a live snuff show. Eventually the broadcast causes Max to suffer a brain tumor and hallucinations, which turns out to be the ultimate aim of Videodrome—to purge socially derelict people through this medium. Videodrome uses the metaphor that exposure to sex and violence in media leads to terrible consequences by having its protagonist become the victim of the very material he exploits. Many 1980s films brought the message that media could manipulate and were concurrent with the fears surrounding technological advancement of the era, but the message still remains today. As McLuhan notes, “Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not in the battlefields of Vietnam.”28 Today, technology infiltrates our daily lives and everyday human interactions. With the Internet and newer, more advanced tech ever increasing, information is accessed more quickly and widely than ever before. Television itself changed our lives—we boiled the kettle during commercial breaks; we rearranged our furniture around it; it is a conversation starter; it shapes identities and reality, therefore, Craven’s use of television, media violence, and electricity brings a sense of anxiety, premised on the idea of something we use for enjoyment becoming something horrific— as in Shocker. t v p o rta l s

Many influential horror films have used television as a portal to another world, with notable examples including Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) and Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998). In both of these famous stories, the television is representative of the influence that media (whether broadcast on television or recorded on video) can have on children. This cultural terror of technology,

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and its effects on young minds, also matches the rivalry that television and VHS brought against the theatrical life of films. Cinemas tend to have more control over who gets to watch sex and/or violence with age restrictions—in a bid to protect the youngest in society from images considered “dangerous.” Yet, watching films at home removes any “protection” because anyone can, theoretically, watch whatever they want (this argument is even more valid since the emergence of the Internet). It often lands upon the parents’ responsibility to ensure children are not witnessing television violence, yet this is not a reliable restriction in its own right, given the option to view at friends’ houses, late night television, and so forth. Jonathan, during the end chase scene that takes place with Pinker within the television, manages to regain some control by using the remote control to channel surf and keep Pinker on the run, as his friends get set to trap his supernatural entity within an eternal electric loop. The channels and clips highlight media violence within this era and at least some of the challenges and changes of the past half-decade, including riots in Berlin; Atomic bomb tests; footage from World War 2. These images are potent and possibly present, and even satirize (“real” world horrors vis-a-vis the “unreal” fantasy escapism of Shocker) at least some of the fear of violent television repercussions that Craven threads throughout the film and doubtlessly had to deal with as a director of violent genre material.

media

A common concern in society is that media desensitizes us—crime stories, foreign policy, urban conflict, war—all add to an overwhelming amount of violence that we have access to witness daily.29 During the opening credits scene of Shocker, the news reports: Police are sure only of the following: he is male and savagely powerful. In almost all cases he has battered his way to victims through locked doors and he is so intelligent that he has managed not only to elude police for these nine months but escape identification of any kind. Media exaggeration, as seen in this scene, is used to create a dramatic effect—but borders on sensationalism.30 Shocker’s use of media reporting to “sensationalize” Pinker is also Craven’s critique of the danger of fetishizing violence or turning trauma into drama.31 The film’s use of media violence—the news reports, the background channels during the final chase scene—could be termed what 1960s Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan dubs “hot” media, in that it requires very little audience participation but visually (and viscerally) captivates. McLuhan’s

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work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) emphasizes the effect of mass media on our thoughts and behaviour: The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium, that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by and new technology.32 Wes Craven’s more notable meta-horror franchise, Scream, literalizes the exploration of violent media and its cultural impact by using self-awareness regarding the accepted and recurring punishments for characters in horror cinema. Across all four of his Scream films, characters acknowledge the risk of media violence and its effect on people (in the cinema, on video, and, in the fourth film, online) when the killer/s use their exposure to such imagery and ideas as part of their reasoning for having committed such crimes. Indeed, there is an unavoidable self-referential element to horror films that depict “fictional” violence as a potential threat, including Scream and Shocker, because the genre itself carries a similar stigma.33 Having Shocker show violence on television, during a decade when VHS horror became popular and controversial, also brings state brutality to the forefront when Pinker is executed. Here we see the theme of criminal violence meeting (equally barbaric) state retribution, potentially demonstrative of the cultural divide between criticizing “faked” film horrors and “accepting” real world tragedy, whether on death row or via

Figure 10.3  Despite its comical tone, Shocker touches on serious topics such as the death penalty in the United States

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war (as mentioned earlier, Shocker shows us Pinker navigating terrestrial television and appearing in front of a documentary on the nuclear bomb). Craven thus shows us that when confronted with the irrational violence of others, we might rationalize our own violence against it (hence the death penalty). The director’s earlier film, The Last House on the Left, also demonstrates this “rationalized violence” against criminals when the parents of a dead teenager seek sadistic revenge against a group of criminals. Central to the concept of state violence is that of control and moral judgement. Killers are seen to lack the same moral compass and ethical framework as “us.” Pinker cannot stop and nor does he want to. His Otherness and irrational killings thus make it supposedly justifiable to have him suffer on the electric chair. Part of Shocker’s cultural reflections involve generational conflict and the fear that we pass our own mistakes onto our children. Teens in films represent the younger generation, who refuse this heritage of destruction. The British documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012) sees a character using psychoanalysis to explain what shapes our beliefs—and films are used to explore how they reinforce some of our dominant ideologies. Shocker’s sister film, They Live (1988), sees protagonist Nada discover sunglasses that can show what the world is truly like. Like Shocker, They Live offers a powerful message and shows, through its provocative thematic, that the media can attempt to control society’s narrative, at least until they create a monster that uses those same technological channels for self-empowerment. Whilst They Live focuses more upon larger ideological and governmental control, Shocker chooses to return to Craven’s favorite aesthetic: the white “protected” suburbs of Americana and the blissful existence behind the closed curtains, with the television as the mediator of the “outside,” but evil always there . . . always waiting to prey. notes   1. Brian. J. Robb (1998) Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven. (London: Titan Books), 137.   2. Ibid., 137. Censorship and concerns over identifying with violence and killers were the main concerns that Craven states Fox Network had.   3. Later aired on NBC.   4. Athorne, S., “Welcome to my Nightmare: Does the Director Wes Craven have Blood on his Hands?”, The Times (March 2, 2003). Accessed December 9, 2022. Available from: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/welcome-to-my-nightmare-does-the-director-wescraven-have-blood-on-his-hands-b3hws6dqzp3.   5. Kim Newman, “Vile VHS: Unspooling the History of the ‘Video Nasty’ Controversy,” BFI (May 29, 2021). Accessed December 9, 2022. Available from: https://www.bfi.org. uk/sight-and-sound/features/history-british-video-nasties.   6. Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Translated by A. A. Brill. Wordsworth Classics of World Literature (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 483. “The royal road to the unconscious” is a common quote regarding Freud’s view on dreams.

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  7. Geneviéve Robert and Antonio Zadra, “Thematic and Content Analysis of Idiopathic Nightmares and Bad Dreams,” Sleep (Vol. 1, No. 37(2), February 2014), 409–17. doi: 10.5665/sleep.3426. PMID: 24497669; PMCID: PMC3900621.   8. Laura Geggel, “Here’s What it Could Mean when you Dream about Killing Someone,” Insider (December 1, 2014). Accessed December 9, 2022. Available from: https://www. businessinsider.com/what-dreams-about-killing-someone-mean-2014-12?r=US&IR=T. Dreaming of murder, whether it is being murdered or murdering someone else, is quite common and analysed in various ways. It is used in this essay for the purpose of linking the Freudian-style dream interpretation of family resentment and anger symbolism in murder dreams to the film’s father and son relations.   9. It is revealed in the film that Jonathan is the result of rape. His biological father, Horace Pinker, raped his mother. This further adds to the anger and violence directed towards Pinker, and towards the argument that there is a risk Jonathan will end up like his father, because films often depict the children of rape becoming something violent or dangerous due to the horrendous nature of their own conception. Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976), for instance, or A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), which reveals that Freddy Krueger was the result of gang rape. 10. In Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010 edition, originally published 1958), 70. 11. Purrington, Maxwell, “Water is the Commonest Symbol for the Unconscious,” Carl Jung Depth Psychology (February 28, 2022). Accessed December 9, 2022. Available from: https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2022/02/28/water-is-the-commonest-symbolfor-the-unconscious/#.YsViyHbMLIU. 12. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 2nd ed. Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2005), 5. Transitional space is the in-between area of experience, a space between inner and outer realities. Transitional objects carry significant meaning to the child. They are also used within the transitional space as an object that is both real and not real. 13. Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious (London: Penguin, 2004), 493. 14. Jay Daniel Thompson and Erin Reardon, “‘Mommy Killed Him’: Gender, Family, and History in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)”, M/C Journal (Vol. 20, No. 5, 2017). 15. It is worth mentioning that it was not until The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) that Vader identified himself as Luke’s Father, once Obi-Wan Kenobi was dead. 16. Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 73. 17. Jon E. Roeckelein, Elsevier’s Dictionary of Psychological Theories (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2006), 111. 18. Karey L. O’Hara, Jennifer E. Duchschere, Connie J. A. Beck, and Erika Lawrence, “Adolescent-to-Parent Violence: Translating Research into Effective Practice,” Adolescent Research Review (Vol. 2, No. 3, 2017), 181–98. 19. See: David Kerekes and David Slater, See No Evil (Manchester: Critical Vision, 2001). 20. Jonathan David Goff, Spawn, Image Comics (Vol. 236, 2013), 2. 21. Marleen Rozemond, Descartes’s Dualism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), np. 22. Robin Wood used this term to refer to Wes Craven’s 70s work. In “The American Nightmare” by Florence Jacobowitz, Wood queries violence in horror and its catharsis found in many of Craven’s films: “But who bears the brunt of this violence? Where does the violence come from, what are the pressures that make us violent, and how are they released in our society? Who is responsible for this?” Florence Jacobowitz, “The American Nightmare,” Cinema Canada (No. 59, October/November 1979), 5.

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23. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny [1919] (New York: Penguin, 2003), 148. 24. See, for instance, Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992), Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), Maitland McDonagh, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds (London: Sun Tavern, 1991), Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen (Vol. 16, No. 3, October 1975), Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 25. Freud, The Uncanny, 142. 26. Wood, 1986, 70–94. 27. Freud, [1919] 2003, 149—“Death vs life, one end to the other, beginning and end, always against one another.” 28. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGrawHill, 1964), 62. 29. A connection between media violence and desensitization through reduced stimuli and changes in individuals’ arousal states has been shown. N. L. Carnagey, C. A. Anderson, and B. J. Bushman, “The Effect of Video Game Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-life Violence,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (No. 43, 2002), 489–96. 30. William B. Frye, A Qualitative Analysis of Sensationalism in Media (2005). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 3218. Accessed December 9, 2022. Available from: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/3218. 31. University of Derby discusses why people love to watch true crime documentaries, and find that in some cases people like to problem-solve and immerse themselves in working out crime stories, as they feel part of the storytelling narrative. “Why are we so Obsessed with True Crime?” Accessed December 9, 2022. Available from: https://www.derby.ac.uk/ magazine/issue-11/why-are-we-so-obsessed-with-true-crime/. 32. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 5. 33. Graham Thornicroft, “The Horror, the Horror: Stigma on Screen,” in The Lancet Psychiatry (2014)—http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S2215-0366(14)00014-5.

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11

The People Under the Stairs at the Intersection of Black Horror and Children’s Horror Catherine Lester

W

es Craven’s 1991 horror film The People Under the Stairs is perhaps most notable for its protagonist being a working-class Black child named Fool (Brandon Adams). This was a rare sight in an R-rated studio horror film, but in a promotional interview in Cinefantastique, Craven positioned this intersection of youth, social marginalization, and horror as an obvious match: kids and minorities are more comfortable with horror films—because they’re dealing much more with primal issues; in their own bodies, in confrontations with parents and authority figures, being placed in personal danger. These things are familiar to kids in school and people in ghettos; they’re not familiar to adults ensconced in a comfortable house, marriage or job. So the primary audience for horror seems to be either the young or poor, but they’re also essentially adventurers, bold and brave.1

Over thirty years later, this statement seems prescient of how American horror would develop to be more inclusive of marginalized filmmakers, characters, and audiences. Black horror films—made primarily by, for, and about Black Americans—have existed for decades. However, Get Out’s (Jordan Peele, 2017) capturing of the zeitgeist triggered a surge of interest and production of Black horror in American popular culture that resonates with a socio-political climate which continues to be characterized by racial injustice and inequality. Horror specifically for children has also become increasingly mainstream, with the Goosebumps and Monster High transmedia franchises, and films like ParaNorman (Chris Butler, Sam Fell, 2012). As Craven alludes to, Black horror and children’s horror both focus on characters and cater to audiences who occupy marginalized positions in society. They are both also the subjects of

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Figure 11.1  The presence of Fool (Brandon Adams) as the main character gives The People Under the Stairs potential appeal to a far younger audience than its R-rating suggests

growing areas of scholarship.2 It would seem obvious, then, that these categories would be rife for cross-over in child-friendly horror films that center the experiences of Black children navigating a myriad of horrific experiences, from puberty to racism. Nonetheless, US children’s horror films focus almost exclusively on white children, who are also usually male and from affluent suburban locations—for instance Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984), The Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987), The Gate (Tibor Takács, 1987), Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993), Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006), and The Hole (Joe Dante, 2009), to name a few. When ethnic difference and prejudice is addressed in children’s horror it is usually allegorical, where human and non-human characters learn to accept each other, as in Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsky, 2012). In an essay titled “On the Loneliness of the Young Horror Fan” Ally Russell points out that said loneliness is compounded by the fact that when children of color do feature in children’s horror, they are normally relegated to the margins as sidekicks, or part of ensembles of “countless young white people.”3 Examples of such characters include Larry in Don’t Look Under the Bed (Kenneth Johnson, 1999), Wybie in Coraline (Henry Sellick, 2009), ParaNorman’s Salma, Sam in Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (Ari Sandel, 2018), and, on television, Lucas in Stranger Things (2016–).4 This is not to say that such representations do not warrant examination. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, discussing supporting Black female characters in the “dark fantastic” literary mode, points out that the “marginalization of these dark fictional girls [. . .] is analogous to the marginalization of people of color in schooling and society.”5 However, we must

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still question why, until recently, young characters of color have only occupied these marginal positions in children’s horror cinema, what this reflects about the genre’s limitations, and how these limitations might be addressed. The centrality of whiteness in children’s horror is also reflected in Robin R. Means Coleman’s study of Black characters in horror, Horror Noire, and the documentary adaptation of the same name (Xavier Burgin, 2019). No children’s horror films featuring significant non-white characters are addressed in these works because there were none to address. However, they do spotlight “Black” horror films that are adjacent to the category of children’s horror: teen horror films The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996) and Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011); and “adult horror” films with Black child protagonists: Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (Danny Steinmann, 1985), Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997), The Girl With All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016), and The People Under the Stairs.6 Despite centralizing Black childhood, their classifications with R ratings from the MPAA indicates that children are not the intended audience of address, and signals their lack of “suitability” for child audiences in the eyes of the industry. Yet the existence of these films prompts a consideration of why these cannot be considered “children’s horror,” especially when horror films specifically intended for children are arguably failing to represent them beyond a narrow demographic of white, middle-class boys. This chapter argues that one step towards making children’s horror more inclusive is to broaden its boundaries to encompass supposedly “adult horror” films that represent child protagonists of color. The People Under the Stairs is not only such a film, but it is also one of the first children’s horror films to center on a Black child and offer a refreshing departure from the genre’s privileging of whiteness. t h e p e o p l e u n d e r t h e s ta i r s a s c h i l d r e n ’ s h o r ro r

( b l ac k )

To establish The People Under the Stairs as children’s horror, it is necessary to acknowledge why it might not be considered as such. In my own attempt to define children’s horror cinema, I have argued that it must significantly lessen, or exclude altogether, several of the very aspects that are generally considered as making horror films “horrific” in order to be considered “suitable” for children’s consumption by adult gatekeepers.7 These “horrific” elements include extreme violence, swearing, and sexual content, the inclusion of which results in a restrictive rating of R or higher. Most children’s horror films evade such limitations by finding “strategic ways to alleviate” violence and fear through the blending of horror with fantasy, comedy, and the use of stylized aesthetics or animation.8

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In The People Under the Stairs, little mitigation occurs. The film does share characteristics with children’s (horror) cinema: its situation within the perspective of a child protagonist; the representation of adults as villains or ineffectual bystanders; its blending of horror and comedy; and its setting within a house loaded with enough booby traps to rival Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990). Yet these elements are offset by material that easily justifies an R rating: the frequent use of curse words and slurs, including the N-word; gory violence; incest; cannibalization; and one of the villains pursuing Fool with a shotgun while wearing a gimp suit. Just in case any guardians were tempted to take children to see the film in 1991, an LA Times review urged readers that “it’s absolutely not for youngsters—even though it stars two engaging young people.”9 Arguably, however, to limit the boundaries of children’s cinema by only including films that bear “child-friendly” ratings of G, PG, and PG-13 is to ignore the realities of how children engage with films, especially those that are marked by adult culture as “taboo”. Ian Wojcik-Andrews suggests that the term “children’s film” could include “films children see regardless of whether or not they are children’s films.”10 Similarly, Filipa Antunes argues that children’s horror is better identified by how it circulates among actual children than by what adult culture considers appropriate for them. As such, “ratings are of no consideration when identifying a children’s horror film.”11 Indeed, while ratings can limit children from seeing certain horror films in the space of cinema exhibition, the home is just as significant a space for children’s spectatorship of horror because it provides greater opportunities for the viewing of forbidden texts. Studies on childhood viewing of horror corroborate that children frequently watch horror texts at home, both “for” children and not, and that doing so is a key way that children engage with and become life-long fans of horror.12 The People Under the Stairs is positioned as such in Nightbooks (David Yarovesky, 2021), a children’s horror film in which a poster of the Craven text is shown on the bedroom wall of the white protagonist, an ardent horror fan, along with posters for R-rated films The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Nightbooks therefore situates The People Under the Stairs as belonging to a canon of children’s horror culture regardless of its rating. Nevertheless, the R rating officially marks it as “not for children” by the dominant adult culture. It is therefore concerning that the few opportunities for Black children to see themselves represented in horror is by watching films that are not meant for them, or make do with representation as supporting characters to white protagonists in horror films intended for children’s consumption (of which Nightbooks is another example). This discrepancy is revealing about how the horror film industry imagines the child audience, and exemplifies what Thomas calls the “imagination gap” to describe the diversity crisis in children’s media.13 In relation to horror, this “gap” is particularly egregious given Craven’s acknowledgement of the obvious potential

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for horror to resonate with audiences of marginalized identities. If Black children are doubly marginalized by virtue of their age and race, children’s horror can provide a cathartic outlet for anxieties relating to this intersectional marginalization and societal oppression, in a similar way to how such films as Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) to Get Out and Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022) do for Black adults. To study The People Under the Stairs through the dual critical lenses of children’s horror and Black horror is one step towards closing the imagination gap in children’s horror cinema, but it also reveals how much the rest of the children’s horror genre has been shaped by whiteness. To this end, this chapter examines The People Under the Stairs’s handling of two key characteristics of children’s horror and how it transforms these via their application to a Black-centric horror film: the (sub)urban setting, and the presentation of the film through a child’s gaze.

“you can see the lights here:” the people under (sub)urban gothic

o f t h e g h e t t o f ro m t h e s ta i r s a s

One commonality of adult horror films and children’s films of all genres is the frequency with which they are set in the suburbs; so frequently that Bernice M. Murphy and Angus McFadzean coined the terms “suburban Gothic” and “suburban fantastic” respectively, to give name to this phenomenon.14 These categories draw on connotations of the suburb as a supposedly tranquil space that becomes disrupted by an external, supernatural force that often represents a societal “other.” In McFadzean’s suburban fantastic—a category that encompasses a range of children’s horror, fantasy, and science-fiction films of the late-twentieth century, such as The Monster Squad and Small Soldiers (Joe Dante, 1998)—the monstrous invasion directly serves the character arc of the white, male, middle-class hero, whose expulsion of the fantastic element from suburbia facilitates his transformation into an embodiment of patriarchal values.15 This narrative does not easily lend itself to being applied to children of marginalized identities, whose status as such is more likely to mark them as an “intruder” on the expected whiteness of the suburban locale. For Means Coleman, it is precisely the cultural association between the suburb and whiteness that resulted in a relative lack of Black characters in 1980s horror films, especially the popular slasher subgenre, which favors suburban and rural settings, in a development that was arguably a step backward from the proliferation of Blaxploitation horror in the 1970s.16 The People Under the Stairs therefore subverts trends in contemporaneous mainstream horror and children’s cinema by making the “invading” force its hero, a Black, working-class child from a Los Angeles ghetto (as it is referred to in the film). The suburb itself and its white, affluent inhabitants are represented

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as the monsters, a move that simultaneously reinforces and critiques the whiteness of cinematic suburbia. The film begins with Fool learning that his mother is ill and that the family is to be evicted from their apartment by their wealthy landlords, the Robesons. Fool is talked into joining his sister’s friend Leroy, a Black man, and Leroy’s white friend Spenser, into attempting to rob the Robesons’ fortress-like house in a more affluent neighborhood. Once inside, Leroy and Spenser are quickly killed, leaving Fool alone to discover that behind the pleasant exterior of the house lurk disturbing secrets: the Robesons have kidnapped numerous children in their search for “perfect” children to call their own. Children who do not abide by the Robesons’ “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” mantra are mutilated and banished to the basement, where they survive through cannibalism. After taking refuge within the house’s walls, Fool meets Alice, a white girl who has so far been spared banishment to the basement but is abused by her captors, who unbeknownst to her are an incestuous couple and not her real parents. For the remainder of the film, Fool works to help Alice and the “people under the stairs” escape and bring justice against the Robesons. The People Under the Stairs is not unique in representing unseen disturbances in the suburban Gothic/fantastic, which for Murphy is defined by its suggestion of a “dark and terrifying underside” to suburbia’s outwardly peaceful facade.17 Nor is the film’s representation of the suburb a departure for Craven, in whose films “the pristine outer structure of the house conceals a dangerously rotten core” towards his “sustained interest [. . .] in exposing hypocrisy and deceit at the heart of the ‘All American Family.’”18 This factor marks The People Under the Stairs out as different from most other children’s suburban Gothic/fantastic texts, where the corrupt element is an anomaly that can be easily expelled, restoring the safety of the suburb. Monster House

Figure 11.2  The People Under the Stairs was a commercial success for Wes Craven in 1991, with critics praising the performance of Brandon Adams (pictured)

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(Gil Kenan, 2006) for example represents its eponymous house as distinct from others in its neighborhood with its gray-brown coloring, barren garden, and the use of low-angle tracking shots to convey its foreboding presence. This contrasts against the pleasant, white-washed houses that surround it, one of which is the comfortable home of protagonist DJ. In The People Under the Stairs there is no such sanctuary, no safe or pleasant equilibrium to restore, because the unseen corruption is normality. The Robesons’ house shows no outward signs of disturbance from street view, its interior corruption only hinted at by a crooked sign and a broken porch light. Not even the ghetto that is Fool’s home is much of a refuge—the corridors of his apartment building are cramped, darkly lit, and populated with addicts and stray dogs. Moreover, while it is geographically distant from the Robesons’ house, the ghetto is merely an extension of their corruption as the greedy landlords who are responsible for its impoverishment.19 One aspect of suburbia that does unite The People Under the Stairs and children’s horror films is the representation of the police. Children’s horror films from Gremlins to Monster House represent institutional authority figures as ineffective bystanders at best, and at worst as comic relief who exacerbate situations and invariably get terrorised or eaten by the films’ monsters, leaving the children to save the day on their own.20 In The People Under the Stairs the police are just as useless to Fool as to the white protagonists in children’s horror, but the racial dynamics of this are foregrounded in the way that the officers who call on the Robesons (responding to a 911 call made by Fool) leave after being sweet-talked and offered cookies and milk, all too willing to be distracted by the façade of white, wealthy normalcy. The People Under the Stairs therefore does not divert heavily from the narrative and thematic patterns of the majority of adult and children’s horror films that seek to expose the rotten core of the American suburb, its differences only working to heighten and make visible the racial politics that underline the suburban imaginary. This would suggest that children’s horror films were always suited to being told from a more inclusive range of subject positions. The next section explores this hypothesis by turning to Fool’s representation as a Black child hero.

“see

n o e v i l ” : r e j e c t i n g t h e w h i t e , a d u lt g a z e

I have argued elsewhere that one of the main differences between children’s horror and adult horror is the representation of children who do not conform to dominant expectations of innocence and passivity.21 The so-called “terrible child” trope pervades adult horror films like The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976), where antagonistic, unruly children threaten

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the adult-controlled social order. Dominic Lennard identifies a particular type of child antagonist he calls the “looking child,” as seen in Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960). Lennard argues that these children are made disturbing to the adult audience of address because their active employment of the gaze is an “upheaval of the comforting passivity the adult expects.”22 Children’s horror films depart from this traditional representation of children as villains to be destroyed or saved by an adult representative. Instead, children’s horror films allow their child characters to “[engage] in violent behavior that seems to challenge the notion of childhood innocence” without them being vilified.23 Children’s horror films also redefine Lennard’s concept of the antagonistic “looking child” as a heroic protagonist with an active, empathetic, and sometimes supernatural gaze. In ParaNorman, for example, Norman is a medium who can see and speak to the dead, a skill that he uses to protect his town from a zombie invasion. Norman’s point-of-view is formally reinforced by an empathetic camera that remains at his eye level, and a miseen-scène that emphasizes his status as a marginalized being in a large, frightening world that does not take him seriously.24 In doing so, ParaNorman and other children’s horror films imply a child audience of address which is invited to identify with empowered representations of on-screen children. Fool aligns with Norman and other protagonists of children’s horror films, as The People Under the Stairs is narratively and formally presented mainly from his perspective. This is most prominent after Fool becomes separated from Spenser and Leroy inside of the Robesons’ house and utilizes an investigative gaze to search for them, and for an escape. He eventually comes across the dark basement, where he uses a lighter to navigate and then to peer into a vent, shown in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the audience with him in his curiosity, trepidation, and then shock when a gust of air, dust, and light blasts through the vent into his face (Figure 11.1). This causes Fool to stumble around momentarily, and when he finds his bearings, shafts of light breaking through the slatted walls fall across his face to highlight his eyes, which rest upon something out of frame, revealed in a reverse-shot to be Spenser’s lifeless body (Figure 11.2). Narrative and formal strategies like these align us with Fool as interlopers in the Robesons’ home and witness to the horrific acts that occur within it. However, Fool’s race separates him from his white equivalents in children’s horror. In many children’s horror films, looking is a dangerous act that triggers the horrific events that occur, such as in Joe Dante’s The Hole when the child heroes gaze into the titular hole, after which their worst fears begin to emerge from it to haunt them. Similarly, in The People Under the Stairs, visitors to the house who “saw too much” are killed, and child captives who break the Robesons’ “speak no evil” rule are punished by the excision of their tongues. Unlike Fool, however, these prior victims appear to be white. Once the Robesons discover that Fool has infiltrated the house and is with Alice, they become incensed at the thought of a Black male sexually corrupting Alice, who they

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have shaped to be a paragon of white femininity and innocence; they voice worry about what Fool is up to with their “little angel,” who they costume as a doll-like object in frilly, white, floral-patterned dresses. They are also obsessed with keeping her clean, drawing a connection with their obsession with racial purity. As Alice explains to Fool, the Robesons are seeking out “the perfect boy child” to complete their twisted family unit. Evidently, Fool does not fit the brief, and the Robesons intend to punish him by castrating not his tongue, like the white boy victims, but his testicles. The Robesons’ treatment of Fool is reflective of bell hooks’s writing on the racial dynamics of spectatorship in white supremacist society, in which to gaze while Black, especially as a Black male, can have vastly different and more dangerous consequences than for whites. While white men are generally given license to gaze as they please—in reality, and within films—hooks refers to “real life public circumstances,” such as the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmet Till, “wherein black men were murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other.”25 As Debbie Olson observes, this notion that the presumption of innocence is a privilege denied to Black subjects is replicated in Hollywood family films where wholesome representations of childhood are overwhelmingly white, and are contrasted by “a daily barrage of images in television and news media that offer images of children of colour as dangerous or adultified – decidedly not innocent.”26 Similarly, in The People Under the Stairs, the Robesons perceive Fool’s mere proximity to Alice as a violation, but Craven is careful to refute this assumption through film form. Alice is never framed as an object of Fool’s gaze, and her own perspective gradually becomes more formally and narratively prominent as she grows disillusioned with the Robesons and gains the confidence to stand up to them. The film also establishes, through Leroy, that Fool is of no sexual threat to Alice in Leroy’s lament that the thirteen-year-old Fool is “too old to get tit, too young to get ass” and contrasts against Fool’s lack of physical or sexual threat. Played by Ving Rhames, Leroy’s tall, stocky build emphasizes Fool’s comparatively small stature, and he uses sexually-coded language such as “I done busted this house’s cherry” upon breaking into the Robesons’ house.27 While the film condemns the Robesons’ baseless assumptions about Fool, its use of Leroy as a counterpoint problematises the film’s racial politics by trading in a stereotype of Black masculinity that is associated with criminality and physical and sexual dominance. However, Fool and Leroy are linked by their “Robin Hood” intentions to steal from the Robesons to benefit themselves and other members of the ghetto. The film concludes with Fool discovering a stash of gold coins and cash hidden in the depths of the Robesons’ house, which he distributes evenly with his community by exploding dynamite that scatters the money among his neighbors, who have gathered outside to confront their greedy landlords. With this ending and its explicit rejection of white, capitalist, patriarchal values, The People Under

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the Stairs is strikingly optimistic compared with Craven’s prior horror work. Instead, it is arguably aligned more closely with children’s films like The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985), in which the children’s discovery of treasure prevents their neighborhood from being foreclosed and developed into a country club. The People Under the Stairs’s themes, narrative, and formal alignment with a morally righteous and engaging child hero demonstrate why it ought to be considered part of the canon of children’s horror, despite the “adult” content that earned its R rating. However, we must return to the fact of this rating, and the question of why for so long the only significant representations of Black childhood in horror have been in films that are deemed unsuitable for the eyes of actual children? c l o s i n g t h e i m a g i n at i o n g a p : b l a c k c h i l d r e n ’ s h o r ro r a f t e r t h e p e o p l e u n d e r t h e s ta i r s

The relative frequency of Black child protagonists in horror for adults, but not for children, implies that the US film industry considers the experiences of Black childhood to be inherently too horrific for child horror audiences. However, the racist and violent treatment that Fool experiences at the hands of the Robesons may not be a far cry from the experiences of actual Black American children, as evidenced by the countless Black youth who have been arrested or killed for behavior that in white children would be deemed harmless.28 Although children’s horror films deal in imagery of the supernatural and fantastic, they also represent frightening experiences that real children encounter and model ways that the child audience can cope with them emotionally, from the death of a beloved pet in Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012) to cycles of domestic abuse in The Hole. There is no reason that the latter, in a PG-13-rated film, should be considered any more or less suitable for children than the horrors of racism. As Lucy Pearson and Kimberley Reynolds explain in relation to realist children’s fiction, the problem is not with “how much reality children can be expected to bear” but rather “how much realism adults can bear to give them.”29 In the context of this chapter, we can rephrase this to ask how much reality adults can bear to give a presumed audience of white children? This question echoes the ongoing furore in the US concerning the teaching of topics relating to racial inequality in schools, where some conservative lawmakers and parents are opposed to the history of slavery, or the existence of racism in general, being acknowledged in curricula despite the reality that Black children have little choice but to encounter racism firsthand from an early age.30 Although some of the horrors that Fool encounters in The People Under the Stairs are extreme, the racism he is subjected to is arguably the most realistic and shocking of these experiences. By representing

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Figure 11.3  The People Under the Stairs shows the seedy underbelly of a rich suburban family

a Black child’s experience of racism, the film is a stark example of how the horror genre is well-suited to working through frightening realities, but also the difficulties in representing these problems in ways that conform to hegemonic notions of “child-friendly” material. The People Under the Stairs’s centering of Black childhood makes it a watershed moment in US horror cinema, even if Means Coleman disqualifies it from being true “Black horror” due to its “predominantly White cast, crew and textual thrust.”31 Kasi Lemmons’s Southern Gothic Eve’s Bayou (1997) further diversified Black, child-centric horror by presenting a Black female gaze in front of and behind the camera, but it is also R-rated. It would not be until 2020, with The Witches (Robert Zemeckis, 2020), A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting (Rachel Talalay, 2020), and Vampires vs. the Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020) that we would begin to see Black childhood prioritized in horror films that are intended for children’s consumption and marked as such by child-inclusive film ratings. Of these, only Vampires is directed by a person of color, and it is the closest spiritual successor to The People Under the Stairs. In the film, the BlackLatinx tweens must protect their urban community from being gentrified by white vampires, thus inflecting a typical children’s horror narrative with pertinent socio-political themes. While there remains progress to be made in the diversification and intersectionality of children’s horror in all aspects of identity, Black children’s horror films from The People Under the Stairs and beyond fulfil Craven’s hypothesis and reveal the structures of whiteness that have needlessly defined children’s horror for so long.

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notes   1. Wes Craven quoted in Steve Biodrowski, “Wes Craven: Alive and Shocking!,” Cinefantastique (Vol. 22, No. 2, October 1991), 11.   2. On Black horror see Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (New York: Routledge, 2011), Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, edited by Dawn Keetley (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020), and Leila Taylor, Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul (London: Repeater Books, 2019). On children’s horror see Filipa Antunes, Children Beware: Childhood, Horror and the PG-13 Rating (Jefferson: McFarland, 2020) and Catherine Lester, Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).   3. Ally Russell, “On the Loneliness of the Young Horror Fan,” Nightfire (July 26, 2021). Accessed March 30, 2022. Available from: https://tornightfire.com/on-the-lonelinessof-the-young-horror-fan/?fbclid=IwAR1NcNslT0z66t1sk0DflWvfJuaTkt8t-pgmc2WOIIGsyhPAamnBR-bAaw.   4. Disney’s The Haunted Mansion (Rob Minkoff, 2003) is a children’s horror film with Black protagonists; however, as an Eddie Murphy star vehicle where the Black child characters occupy relatively small supporting roles, it falls outside of the purview of my interest in texts in which Black children are the focus.   5. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 11. For such an examination of race in Coraline, see Caetlin Benson-Allott, “The Chora Line: RealD Incorporated,” The South Atlantic Quarterly (Vol. 110, No. 3, 2011), 621–44.   6. Further examples include Carrie (David Carson, 2002), Us (Jordan Peele, 2019), Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019), and The Boy Behind the Door (David Charbonier and Justin Powell, 2020).   7. Catherine Lester, “The Children’s Horror Film: Characterizing an ‘Impossible’ Subgenre,” The Velvet Light Trap (No. 78, 2016): 25.   8. Ibid., 34.   9. Kevin Thomas, “What’s Under the Stairs is not for Children,” Los Angeles Times (November 4, 1991). Accessed March 30, 2022. Available from: https://www.latimes.com/archives/ la-xpm-1991-11-04-ca-616-story.html. 10. Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 19. 11. Antunes, Children Beware!, 20–1. 12. David Buckingham, Moving Images: Understanding Children’s Emotional Responses to Television, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Martin I. Smith, “Remembering ‘The Scariest Movie of All Time’: A Grounded Audience Study of The Exorcist,” (doctoral thesis, Northumbria University, 2019). 13. Thomas, The Dark Fantastic, 5–7. 14. Bernice M. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Angus McFadzean, Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 15. McFadzean, Suburban Fantastic Cinema, 53. 16. Means Coleman, Horror Noire, 146. See also Dale Bailey’s argument that popular haunted house narratives of the 1980s prioritised white, middle-class anxieties about home ownership in American Nightmares: The Haunted House in American Popular Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 48–50. 17. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic, 11.

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18. Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 83; Murphy, 2009, 150. 19. Murphy points out that the Robesons own the ghetto liquor store, “feeding the addictions that have helped bring the community to its knees.” Murphy, The Suburban Gothic, 154. 20. Lester, Horror Films for Children, 177–9. 21. Ibid., 11–14. 22. Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 52. 23. Megan Troutman, “It’s Alive . . . AGAIN. Redefining Children’s Film Through Animated Horror,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television, edited by Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 150. 24. Lester, Horror Films for Children, 96–100. 25. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 118. 26. Debbie Olson, “Screening Innocence in Children’s Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film, edited by Noel Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 68; italics in original. 27. Means Coleman takes this point about Leroy’s sexuality further by describing him as Fool’s sister’s pimp, although this is not made explicit in the film itself. Horror Noire, 191. 28. I have noted elsewhere that this discrepancy is also present in children’s and teen horror by comparing the endings of The Monster Squad and Attack the Block; in the former, white children boast to army generals about destroying antagonistic monsters, while in the latter the Black, working-class hero is arrested by police for the same achievement. Lester, Horror Films for Children, 178–9. 29. Lucy Pearson and Kimberley Reynolds, “Realism,” in The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by David Rudd (London: Routledge, 2010), 69. 30. For context and detail about this ongoing issue, see A. J. Walker, “CBSN Originals Documentary Explores Debate over how and when Race should be Taught in Schools,” CBS News (November 4, 2021). Accessed March 30, 2022. Available from: https://www. cbsnews.com/news/critical-race-theory-teaching-kids-cbsn-originals/?ftag=CNM-0010aab7e&linkId=138646438. 31. Means Coleman, Horror Noire, 8.

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12

“I’m a whole other thing”: The People Under the Stairs and Systemic Racism in the Reagan/ Bush Era Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

W

ritten and directed by Craven in 1991, The People Under the Stairs (hereafter People) came after The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and Shocker (1989), followed by a three-year hiatus from cinema (he directed Night Visions and Nightmare Café for television) before Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), making it the center film in a loose trilogy of Craven projects directly engaging Black culture. Although marketed as a horror film (the voiceover for the trailer begins: “In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid. Now Wes Craven, creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street takes you inside . . . ” implying an experience very similar to Freddy Krueger), the film was not a “new Nightmare” but rather a critique of gentrification, capitalism, and systemic racism (particularly in the urban real estate business) of the Reagan/Bush era. Taking place in Los Angeles (rather than the Mid-west suburbs in which many of Craven’s 80s films were set), the film depicts two adult burglars, Leroy (Ving Rhames) and Spenser (Jeremy Roberts), and their thirteenyear-old accomplice Poindexter Williams AKA “Fool” (Brandon Quintin Adams), breaking into the home of a wealthy white couple (who are unnamed, called “Man” and “Woman” in the credits, but referred to in the narrative as “Mommy” [Wendy Robie] and “Daddy” [Everett McGill]), who are slumlords. The burglars then learn about a number of children held prisoner in the basement (the eponymous “people under the stairs”), before all of them except Fool lose their lives at the hands of Mommy and Daddy. Fool then works with Alice (A. J. Langer), Mommy and Daddy’s “daughter” (their victim whom they kidnapped), and Roach (Sean Whalen), one of the people under the stairs who has escaped into the walls, to expose and defeat Mommy and Daddy and save not just the kidnapped children, but also Fool’s family, who are equally trapped by the housing system Mommy and Daddy manipulate.

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Figure 12.1  Among the young cast of The People Under the Stairs is A. J. Langer as the abused and captive Alice

The film exists as a satire of the Reagan/Bush vision of conservatism, while depicting Fool as a young Black man with intelligence and agency who can maneuver around the system literally built to trap him.1 In doing so, Craven models a kind of horror that will be seen in the twenty-first century in such narratives as Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) and the television series Lovecraft Country (2020–): the experience of systemic racism as horror. This chapter will examine The People Under the Stairs in two contexts: its original socioeconomic context as a critique of Reagan’s and Bush’s America and reflective of concerns voiced in other popular culture from the time, and then briefly consider People as a forerunner of twenty-first-century Black horror. The film was released in 1991, in the eleventh year of the conservative culture of the Reagan/Bush era, following Reagan’s 1980 election to the presidency. Reagan ran on a conservative platform, emphasizing capitalism, militarism, and faith. Without being directly and overtly racist, Reagan’s agenda arguably divided the nation into those who were “real” Americans (white, Christian, wealthy, patriotic individuals) and those who were not (“welfare queens,” who were painted as being Black, although the majority of people on welfare at the time were white, “illegal immigrants,” and anyone who believed America to be an unequal nation/did not believe in capitalism).2 Craven’s film even coincided with the filmed beating of Rodney King in early March 1991 and the riots subsequent to the trial of the officers involved being found not guilty (April 29–May 4, 1992)—The People Under the Stairs was released November 3, 1991, in between these two events. The film itself telegraphs its political intents by having the conservative Mommy and Daddy watch footage of the

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Gulf War (August 1990–February 1991) on television and parrot the administration’s cautionary statements of welfare queens (they also mention “lazy Blacks”), not to mention Reagan’s well-documented practice of referring to First Lady Nancy Reagan as “Mommy,” the term the man uses to refer to the woman in the house. The house itself is also central to both the narrative and the overarching critique of conservatism, which will be seen repeatedly throughout this discussion. It is first and foremost a funeral home, although it no longer serves that purpose. The mortuary elements allowed the house to be transformed into a fortress, with traps and an extended, fortified basement. John Kenneth Muir argues the house “is as much Fool’s nemesis as its owners are” and this is true.3 The house, however, also stands as a grand metaphor in a film full of them. The home is the place of domestic bliss, particularly as presented during the Reagan administration, and the nuclear family are what makes America great.4 In this case, however, the house itself is not merely the home of Mommy and Daddy but a chamber of horrors filled with booby traps, deadfalls, ambushes, hidden weapons, and snares. From a single secret closet on the first floor, Mommy and Daddy control all access points—all internal and external doors and windows, the electricity, and the traps. They can use the controls to make all seem normal to outsiders, such as the police, or transform the house into a death trap for strangers. They also use it to trap their “children”—street kids who they have kidnapped in their attempts to make an ideal nuclear family before ultimately rejecting them for some real or imagined imperfection. The house is thus old, rotting, corrupt, and hides many sins and secrets, which a more liberal critic might argue makes it an apt metaphor for Reagan’s America. Behind the façade of upper middle-class suburban respectability lies violence, oppression, monstrousness, and perhaps even racism. The film opens with Ruby (Kelly Jo Minter) doing a Tarot reading for Fool on his birthday. “The golden-haired boy is setting off on life’s big adventure,” she tells him, placing the cards Fool, Death, and Devil out on the table. Before we see the protagonist, we hear him referred to as “the golden-haired boy” which is immediately refuted when he is shown. A young Black man with curly black hair, he looks nothing like the blonde youth of the card. Ruby perhaps means it metaphorically, that he is young and blessed (although even that construction is racially based—that blonde people are fortunate), but just as much means it ironically. Poindexter Williams turns thirteen as the film begins. This moment alone sets up so much of the film. His birth name, Poindexter, in the late 80s and early 90s was slang for a nerd, loser, or someone who is very smart but socially awkward. A perfect example is from Young MC’s 1989 hit “Bust a Move” (which won the 1990 Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance), in which he refers to a young man unable to dance, “‘standin’ on the wall like you was Poindexter.” Thus, to be

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a “Poindexter” was to be a loser, a dweeb, a socially inept, under-developed male: a fool. The boy’s own sister, Ruby, dubs him “Fool,” a two-fold name. In the Tarot, the Fool is foolish as he is a young man just starting out on a journey, unaware of the perils, dangers, and rewards possible. To be a Fool is to be young (and foolish). As Ruby tells him, he is not “the stupid kind of fool” just “the ignorant kind.” The Fool, however, as a Shakespearean character is one who speaks truth to power and tells people the realities they are unable to see themselves. Fool is the boy nerd who will go on an adventure and will expose the foolishness of others. When he enters the house of Mommy and Daddy, Fool will move from ignorance to knowledge, but in doing so, he will also expose the foolishness of Mommy and Daddy, and of Leroy and Spenser, as well as the entire socioeconomic system that keeps all of them trapped. That Fool is thirteen is also significant. In many cultures, thirteen is an age of ascension, of becoming an adult. The events of the film take place because on Fool’s thirteenth birthday he becomes a man on the day his family is about to be evicted. In the absence of a father figure—the closest he has is Leroy, who may be Ruby’s lover, but certainly not a great male role model—he is the man of the house now. His mother is sick, and Ruby is a mother to very young children. Fool must “man up” and attempt to provide for his family. The Tarot reading also provides a connection to Craven’s larger milieu and the “Black horror” tradition. Craven is known for the supernatural in his cinema. People does not feature it in the same way that his other two “Black horror” films, the aforementioned The Serpent and the Rainbow and Vampire in Brooklyn, do, but it is present in a much subtler manner. Yvonne P. Chireau observes, “Black Americans utilized conjuring traditions not only because they saw them as a valuable resource for resistance, but because they believed that the supernatural realm offered alternative possibilities for empowerment.”5 Although this comment is somewhat totalizing, the concept, at least, can be seen in a number of other horror films with notable Black characters (hence the dubious “magical negro” trope), as recently as with Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, 2014) but also including Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow and the Stephen King adaptation Skeleton Key (Iain Softley, 2005). The People Under the Stairs begins with Ruby telling Fool’s Tarot—itself a kind of divination and conjuring. It is a singular moment of the supernatural in an otherwise “realistic” film.6 The future Ruby predicts is uncertain, but one that empowers Fool to walk the path of his choice. By extension, the reading both prophesies and promises resistance to systemic racism and oppression as represented by Mommy and Daddy, as well as the empowerment of Fool when he decides not to follow the system or behave as he is expected to behave. A key component of this, as will be discussed below, is that Fool is able to identify with, ally with, and eventually work with exploited and oppressed white people against the actual enemy: the white individuals invested in maintaining the status quo.

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The inciting incident for the film, which reveals the entire situation that causes the events of the film, is laid out as soon as Fool’s Tarot is read. The entire family lives in a shabby apartment in Los Angeles, and they are about to be evicted. “Gotta be out by tomorrow midnight,” Leroy tells Fool. The child’s mother, lying down and coughing, is very ill and Ruby cannot make enough to cover the bills. As a result, the rent is now three days late. The fine print in the lease agreement they signed to even get this dilapidated residence states that when the rent is late, they must pay triple the amount due within three days or be immediately evicted with no opportunity to appeal. Craven’s film thus tackles both the issues of affordable quality housing for the urban poor and the predatory capitalism of the 80s and early 90s (which, to be honest, continues through to today in most American urban areas), in which the urban poor must face usurious and problematic terms in leases. The film depicts the lived experience that the poor are often placed in situations in which they owe more money than they can actually afford but have no other options open to them. When told of the situation, Fool, beginning his journey into adulthood, asks, “Don’t the landlord know mama’s sick and Ruby’s got babies?” “He knows,” Leroy tells him, “He just don’t care.” Worse than that—the landlords see Fool, his family, and their community solely as a revenue stream until they can no longer pay and then clear them out to gentrify the neighborhood and generate even more wealth for themselves. People indicts both the trap in which

Figure 12.2  Brandon Adams as Fool in The People Under the Stairs is given a demanding childactor lead role

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the urban poor find themselves and the “solution” often proposed by cities seeking to develop: gentrification. Brian D. Goldstein identifies the practice of “landlord abandonment” as the common practice in the 70s and early 80s to deal with so-called urban blight.7 The owners of unprofitable buildings simply abandoned them. Fool’s family is one of the few remaining tenants in their building, which is dilapidated, neglected, unsafe, and rat-infested. The landlords care neither for the building nor about the people who live in it—seeking only to maximize profit with minimal effort. Once the damage had been done, the next wave after abandonment involved gentrification: Gentrification was initially understood as the rehabilitation of decaying and low-income housing by middle-class outsiders in central cities. In the late 1970s a broader conceptualisation of the process began to emerge, and by the early 1980s new scholarship had developed a far broader meaning of gentrification, linking it with processes of spatial, economic and social restructuring. Gentrification emerged as a visible spatial component of this transformation.8 Mommy and Daddy own most of the residences in the neighborhood. The community pays most of its income to Mommy and Daddy in the form of rent and commerce. Yet this is not enough. Mommy and Daddy plan to gentrify the neighborhood—indeed, it is why they have driven most tenants out of their buildings and why Fool and his family find themselves in their predicament. Daddy tells Mommy, “We build a nice, neat condominium. We get clean people in there.” The racism underlying their economic plan is abundantly apparent. People of color have lived in their neglected tenement buildings, but they will now tear those structures down and make condominiums to attract the “right” people, i.e. wealthy urban whites, whom Daddy perceives as “clean” as opposed to Fool, his family, and people. Clearly, Craven means for the audience to despise Mommy and Daddy. Not only are they racists who prey on the community off which they profit inordinately, doing so as outsiders who despise the people they ostensibly have commerce with, but they are also part of a larger aberrant family that has been exploiting the community for years. Even in the “profits-over-people” mentality in the 90s, Mommy and Daddy are truly monstrous. In Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) informed America, “Greed is good.” People argues, conversely, that taken to an extreme, greed is not only monstrous but the very embodiment of grotesque self-indulgence that is ultimately self-destructive. Grandpa Booker tells Fool the true history of the house: that the man and woman who call each other “Mommy” and “Daddy” are also brother and sister

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and the last surviving members of a devolving family that made its fortune by exploiting the urban poor, first through mortuary services, and then through gentrification of their own neighborhood. Their own incestuous relationship points to a further message from Craven—one of a refusal to assimilate from the wealthy white elite. This additional narrative point offers three key elements within Craven’s critique of contemporary conservative economics. First, that greed is incestuous, feeding on itself and provoked by a kind of selfish insanity in which one places one’s own profit above the well-being of the community or oneself (hence it has become literally incestuous in this story and thus abject, repulsive, taboo). Second, that the police are on the side of the wealthy and greedy, not serving the community as they often claim to (more on this below). Lastly, the community knows and fears this interracial economic exploitation. The children knew not to go near the house, as it was itself the home of evil that did not mean them or their community well. This monstrous evil is rooted in race and capitalism, or as Annalee Newitz observes, “White power is quite literally a funeral home filled with money.”9 As has been noted even recently, “Racial wealth inequality in the United States is massive, persistent, and well documented.”10 Systemic racism is the reason why Black households have been unable to build up wealth intergenerationally as whites have, and in the case of People, Mommy and Daddy are able to exploit the Black community because they have access to intergenerational wealth that historically those from marginalized racial groups have been unable to secure, nevermind build and pass on.11 The issue of gentrification and intergenerational wealth was already raised in another film from 1991. John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, which was released in the same year but five months before People, saw Furious Styles (Lawrence Fishburne) lecturing the young men in his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood about gentrification: It’s called gentrification. It’s what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening? You bring the property value down. They can buy the land at a lower price, then they move all the people out, raise the property value and sell it at a profit. Now, what we need to do is keep everything in our neighborhood, everything— black. Black owned with black money. He could also have been speaking of the situation in People. More directly than in Boyz n the Hood, People critiques the white suburbs, not for the previous generation’s so-called “white flight” from the urban areas, but that the people who left the cities held onto the property, as Mommy and Daddy have, so as to economically exploit the people (often of color) who moved into the

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neighborhood abandoned by whites. Robin R. Means-Coleman observes that People puts “the ‘hood” and the suburbs “in confrontation with each other,” something no other film of the period had done.12 Gentrification is thus both the inciting incident and the first critique in People, clearly demonstrating the damage done to the Black community by the behaviors of the white suburbs and the predatory capitalism of the Reagan era. One way in which the Reagan administration justified its policies was by representing the urban areas as a locus of crime (conservatives, and some Democrats, of the era were also, famously, opposed to the new sounds of hip-hop). Means Coleman argues People creates a juxtaposition between the inner city, which contains “the criminal element and the poor” and the suburbs, which are “the ideal place for providing cover to the truly grotesque and wicked.”13 In other words, the suburbs are equally, if not more criminal, but the system is manipulated so that white crime is not bound by the law in the same manner that the crimes of urban residents is. Leroy and Fool are criminals out of necessity. Leroy tells Fool their usual third person is in jail “for tryna put food on the table.” They plan to steal from Mommy and Daddy in order to simply stay alive. Mommy and Daddy steal from the urban poor under cover of business law and commerce. They are criminals by choice and through greed. Craven reminds the audience of the relationship between these two criminal encampments visually. The two places are not far apart — Fool can see the ghetto from the attic of Mommy and Daddy’s house. Poverty with no legitimate opportunities to socially advance, the film reminds us, is the motivator for any crimes committed by the lower class. Gentrification, for example, profoundly affects the ability of those who live in urban areas to locate work. “Gentrification accelerates industrial shifts in urban labor markets” observe Lester and Hartley,14 concluding: gentrification may significantly impact the quality of available jobs in certain urban neighborhoods. Specifically, the accelerated decline of manufacturing sectors leads to the loss of relatively higher paying positions for low and moderately trained workers. The positions that replace these traditional “blue collar” jobs tend to either pay lower wages (e.g., restaurant jobs) or may require significant retraining or additional education.15 Hence, property values are lowered and the urban poor forced to relocate only due to gentrification, but the process also itself removes economic opportunities for these residents, especially people of color. Leroy and Spenser (who admittedly is white, but poor and living in the same urban community as Fool and Leroy) have turned to robbery not because they themselves are evil and wicked as Mommy and Daddy posit, but because the economics of gentrification (caused by Mommy

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and Daddy themselves) have removed any employment opportunities for men like them. Gentrification means not just low-paying work, but actually no work for those who live in the neighborhood.16 Annalee Newitz reminds us that the monsters in People are all “socially constructed.”17 Fool, we should be reminded, dreams of being a doctor. He plans to go to medical school and help the community, while also dreaming of living among the upper middle-class. Yet, in the house, when he encounters the eponymous “people under the stairs”—a gang of cannibalistic, mutilated white teenage boys—he must fight them off, yet also works to free them, seeing them as Mommy and Daddy’s victims, just like himself. Newitz observes, “These boys look and act like zombies, feeding on the bodies of people ‘Daddy’ has killed.”18 Unlike Alice and Roach, who are able to communicate, outwit Mommy and Daddy, and ally with Fool, the boys in the basement/under the stairs are simply savages, whom Fool pities. As a result, the film actively depicts a wide variety of race relations beyond the simple “white oppressor/black oppressed” model that still lies at its heart. Newitz also observes: Night of the Living Dead pitted a middle-class black man against low class white zombies, but People suggests a possible alliance between these groups based on class. Alice and her brothers, who live in decayed parts of the house, exist in a kind of internal ghetto. They are white, but they are owned and held captive by Daddy and Mommy, who threaten them with death if they do not obey. Alice and Roach instinctively help Fool, sensing that their relationships to Mommy and Daddy are basically the same as his.19 Nonetheless, the film does not rely on a simple racial dynamic of Black = good/white = bad. As Newitz indicates, the white children of the house are just as oppressed and exploited as the Black people of the urban neighborhood, and all are common victims of Mommy and Daddy. This construction would seem to indicate that it is Mommy and Daddy’s greed and rapacious capitalism that is the true enemy. Their racism allows them to justify their exploitation of the urban poor; their sense of privilege and entitlement allows them to justify kidnapping children in the name of creating a perfect, white nuclear family, the ideal of the Reagan era. Money is not the root of all evil, says the film—rather, the rapacious desire for it, which allows one to dehumanize anyone who does not have it in order to exploit them to gain more, makes one monstrous. There is a literal large pile of money in the basement, which is of no use to the people under the stairs. They have access to it but cannot use it. Fool, upon seeing it, remarks, “No wonder there is no money in the ghetto,” a comic line, but one that also presses home the point that unlike the boys, the urban

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community could use the money, but does not have access to it, as it is literally kept and controlled by the wealthy white family that owns “half the ghetto.” Similarly, the film seems to suggest that the system created and maintained by Mommy and Daddy literally carries the seeds of its own destruction. Trapped in the basement by Daddy, who is armed with a gun, Fool stands in front of crates of dynamite also stored in the basement near the money. He threatens Daddy three times to not shoot at him, lest he set off all the dynamite: “You shoot me, and you die too, man. And you better believe it. Don’t be crazy now. There’s enough dynamite back there to blow you sky high. Not the best place to store it, in my opinion. But there it was. Now just put the gun down,” he cautions the antagonist. When Daddy hesitates, neither shooting nor lowering his weapons, Fool continues, “Put the gun down. I don’t wanna kill you, but I will ’cuz I don’t like you much anyway.” Fool speaks reality and truth to Daddy, who is blinded instead to the immediacy of the situation (a young Black trespasser—and an eloquent one at that!) and by his hatred for Fool. As noted above, should Daddy try to kill Fool, he, too, will die. But the decision to shoot Fool is not a rational one and is not being made by a rational person. Ultimately, it is the third line that makes him shoot. Fool snaps, “I’m tired of fucking around! So, either put the gun down now, or kiss your ass goodbye, boy!” Daddy pulls the trigger when Fool calls him “boy.” It is only when a Black child proceeds to insult him, and hurls the name that white people once used for Black men back at him, that Daddy grows angry enough to shoot regardless of the consequences. Racism and capitalism, the film seems to suggest, contain the seeds of their own self-destruction as they are both irrational and unsustainable. Furthermore, one thing Fool and his family have that the “family” in the funeral home does not is a community. At the end of the film, as Fool fights for his life in the house, the community gathers to protest the landlords and the literal existential threat they represent to the neighborhood and the community. When the house finally explodes, sending the family’s wealth flying through the air to rain down on the gathered residents of the urban neighborhood there to protest, or per Newitz, “The wealth of the dead is redistributed among the living, and as we watch people of color gathering up armloads of money, we also see the white zombies running away penniless.”20 Lovely though this inversion is, it also serves to locate the film very firmly in fantasy and unreality. The money taken from the urban residents is now returned to them, allowing for the gentrification to stop and the neighborhood not to be “developed” but instead restored. The ideology of Mommy and Daddy is focused on the individual and on one taking what one wants—what is best for me. Fool, his family, and the Black community are shown to be more focused on community development—what is best for us. The film clearly sides with Fool and the Black community.

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However, despite the focus being on Fool and the negative impact Mommy and Daddy have on the urban neighborhood they are gentrifying, the film is named after the kidnapped and mutilated white boys in the basement. They are the eponymous “people under the stairs,” the title of which also displays clear class allusions, most similarly to the long-running 70s British television drama program Upstairs, Downstairs, which depicted the slow decline of the British aristocracy at the beginning of the twentieth century as witnessed through the eyes of their servants. As the very title suggests, the wealthy family lives “upstairs,” while those who must serve them work (and live virtually their entire lives) “downstairs,” out of sight. An early working title of the show was “Below Stairs” —the locale suggesting the lower class focus of the show.21 The People Under the Stairs are the titular focus, thus the white boys who suffer and gain no privilege from their whiteness are suggested to be at the center of the film. It is the lack of awareness of race on the part of Alice through which the film depicts the previously mentioned commonality of Mommy and Daddy’s victims overriding racial solidarity in the film, at least among white people. Spenser, who is white, works with Leroy and Fool as their goals are the same— to survive another day under the rapacious and exploitative hyper-capitalism of Mommy and Daddy. When he first encounters Alice, Fool asks, “You never seen a brother before?” Alice responds “Never had a brother,” thinking Fool is speaking of family. He laughs and responds, “No, I mean a Black dude. There’s Black folks in this neighborhood.” Alice seems unaware of the possibility of other lives, other people, and other experiences outside the house. “Can’t get out. No one ever has,” she tells Fool. “Well, I’m gonna get out,” the empowered Fool tells her, adding “I’m a whole other thing.” Alice has no memory of a life before Mommy and Daddy, and especially no knowledge of Black people. Despite growing up in Mommy and Daddy’s house, she shares none of their attitudes towards people of color. The exchange between the two explores how the language by which we address race is cultural and learned (“brother”). The exchange also offers a play on “brother” slang for Black man and “brother,” the familial relation. She has “brothers” inasmuch as there is a whole bunch of kidnapped sons under the stairs and she is the kidnapped daughter, but it is Fool with whom she shares a relationship, which is only possible because he is “a whole other thing.” By being the one who transcends artificial constructions and shows others their own foolishness, Fool is able to see past the traps in the house, the despair of Alice, and the threat of Mommy and Daddy to a reality in which urban poor and suburban victims can cooperate to create a more just and inclusive system. Fool is “a whole other thing”—not defined by demographics or geography—he refuses to accept the situation as given. He is able to defeat the antagonists, the house, and even the system. The film then ends with money raining down on

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the community as “Do the Right Thing” by Readhead Kingpin & The F.B.I. plays over the credits, the song itself also a reference to the 1989 Spike Lee joint Do the Right Thing, which also engages with race relations and violence in urban America, ending with the destruction of a white family’s business in a Black neighborhood. Craven’s film thus contains echoes of other “art” films from the period exploring race, economics, and ideology. Falling in between Craven’s other two Black horror films, People is arguably the most nuanced and critical in its exploration of race, its role in American society, and the horrors that happen as a result of systemic oppression. Robin R. Means Coleman divides horror films that feature Black characters into two categories: “Black horror” and “Blacks in horror,” the former centered on the experience of Black people and the latter featuring Black people in white-centered narratives.22 The People under the Stairs is categorized as “Blacks in horror” rather than “Black horror” for the predominant reason of having a “predominantly White cast, crew and textual thrust.”23 Despite Fool as protagonist, and his family as integral to the story, the film’s focus is on the antagonists, who are privileged in every sense of the word, and, as noted above, the eponymous characters are a gang of kidnapped suburban white teenage boys who try their utmost to attack, kill, and eat Fool until he frees them from the house. As such, whiteness is also at the center of The People Under the Stairs, but it should be maintained that the film is a critique of just that same whiteness. In

Figure 12.3  As with Craven’s best work, The People Under the Stairs contains some evocative and terrifying images

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addition, Craven’s film works as something of a forerunner for twenty-firstcentury horror cinema that explores and critiques race relations, racial identity, and systemic oppression. We might link Craven’s film to another 90s film, Rusty Cundieff ’s Tales from the Hood (1995), which served as forerunner to an emerging subgenre of Black Horror as social critique. Even films such as the aforementioned Get Out and Us (Jordan Peele, 2019), Vampires vs. the Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020), and Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021) arguably take the groundwork that was laid in People and build on it to explore Black experience in contemporary society, while critiquing the systemic oppression that is still a prominent challenge for minorities across America. notes   1. The nickname “Fool” in this case is iconic and not meant as an insult, an idea this chapter will explore below.   2. Space does not permit an extended argument in evidence of this agenda, but the reader is directed to Gillian Brocknell’s Washington Post article “She was Stereotyped as ‘The Welfare Queen,’ The Truth was More Disturbing, a New Book Says” for how Reagan used a single biracial woman committing welfare fraud as a synecdoche for everyone on welfare. Gillian Brocknell, “She was Stereotyped as ‘The Welfare Queen,’ The Truth was More Disturbing, a New Book Says,” Washington Post (May 21, 2019). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/21/shewas-stereotyped-welfare-queen-truth-was-more-disturbing-new-book-says/. See also Chapter Three: “The Wrecking Begins: Reagan” in Ian Haney López’s Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) for a thorough discussion of how Reagan, Lee Atwater, and others deliberately used coded language to appeal to whites and exclude people of color from the category of “real American.”   3. John Kenneth Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), 167.   4. See especially Robin Wood’s critique of the family and home as locus of American horror before, during, and after the Reagan era. See Chapter 5, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s” in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York, NY: Columbia University, 2003), and “Return of the Repressed” and “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” in Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018).   5. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 18.   6. I am using the term “realistic” in the sense of comparison with Craven’s 80s work and The People Under the Stairs’s use of a “real world” setting, but not in the sense of a style of “cinematic realism” as discussed by classic scholars such as Bazin or Kracauer. One hastens to add that The People Under the Stairs is not The Bicycle Thieves.   7. Brian D. Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 157.   8. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London and Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 255.

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  9. Annalee Newitz, Pretend We’ re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 115. 10. Fenaba R. Addo and William A. Darity Jr., “Disparate Recoveries: Wealth, Race, and the Working Class after the Great Recession,” Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science (vol. 695, No. 1, May 2021), 173. 11. Ibid., 174. 12. Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), 191. 13. Ibid., 101. 14. T. William Lester and Daniel A. Hartley, “The Long Term Employment Impacts of Gentrification in the 1990s,” Regional Science and Urban Economics (No. 45, 2014), 80–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2014.01.003, 88. 15. Ibid. 16. It is perhaps worth noting that Craven’s film was a likely inspiration on the (much later) film Vampires vs. the Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020), which depicts gentrifying landlords as actual vampires. The story of Vampires vs. The Bronx features the titular ghouls buying property in the city and evicting low-income people of color who live there. Those who practice gentrification in neighborhoods housing the urban poor are, hence, vampires who drain the lifeblood of the community. What Craven subtly infers in People is made more thematically explicit (and obvious) here. 17. Newitz, 2006, 114. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 115. 21. Richard Marson, Inside UpDown: The Story of Upstairs, Downstairs (Minnetonka, MN: Kaleidoscope, 2001), 33. 22. Means Coleman, 2011, 8. 23. Ibid.

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13

A Nightmare on Video: The Terrors of Home Viewership in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare Max Bledstein

W

es Craven’s New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994) (hereafter, New Nightmare) combines the familiarities of the previous entries in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series (hereafter, Elm Street—labelled as such to avoid any confusion) with a new element: home video. The recurring aspects of the series remain largely intact: iconic monster Freddy Krueger still attacks his victims in their dreams, existing in a liminal space between the dream world and reality. Other characters from earlier in the franchise also return, most notably the star of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), Heather Langenkamp. Co-star of the initial film and Dream Warriors John Saxon likewise appears in New Nightmare, as do producer Robert Shaye, actor Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger), and Craven himself.1 But whereas Langenkamp eventually “combines” with her screen persona of Nancy, a young woman attacked by Freddy (Englund plays both his movie-monster alter-ago and himself) earlier in the series, and Saxon experiences the same confusion as her erstwhile cinematic father, Shaye and Craven only play themselves in New Nightmare—both proposing an uncertainty about the role of horror as critically derided “popcorn” entertainment and its wider need to encompass and critique societal concerns. Most affected by the presence of violent videos in the film is Heather’s son Dylan (Miko Hughes), who views his mother’s performance in the initial film on the family’s television, a scene that is deemed to be (or possibly an astute criticism of) the belief that children cannot separate “real” from fiction.2 The famous “moral crusader” Mary Whitehouse, for instance, would question “how do we will the film-makers with a sense of their own responsibility for the health and welfare not only of the whole of our society, but especially, for pity’s sake, the welfare of the children who are the future?”3

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Figure 13.1  Wes Craven appears as himself in his New Nightmare

The scenes of Dylan watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on video illustrate what James M. Moran calls the “video-in-the-text” (VIT): cinematic uses of “home video as a textual signifier.”4 As numerous scholars have shown, video has particular textual significance within the horror genre, as evidenced by the many horror films which have used the technology as a central narrative aspect (perhaps most famously the Ring franchise) and the format’s relationship with controversy (i.e. “video nasties,” its accessibility to children and so forth).5 This chapter will explore the narrative function of video in New Nightmare. The first section examines Craven’s use of video to investigate his own relationship to the series, a convoluted one given the success of the initial film and his relative lack of creative involvement in the subsequent films in the series prior to New Nightmare.6 The second section looks at how video allows Craven to reflect on his conflicts with those who wanted to censor (and who dismissed) his films and ratings organizations, issues which began with his debut feature, The Last House on the Left (1972), and continued throughout his career. I argue that the use of horror’s distinct capacity to negotiate video spectatorship in New Nightmare facilitates Craven’s self-reflexive interrogation of his contributions to the genre. returning to elm street

New Nightmare focuses on Heather Langenkamp’s story. After putting her roles in the Elm Street series behind her, she has turned her attention to her domestic

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life with son Dylan and husband Chase (David Newsom), who, unbeknownst to her, is working on visual effects for a new film in the series. From the beginning of New Nightmare, Heather is haunted by nightmares familiar from the earlier motion pictures and she envisions herself being attacked by Freddy. Like the rest of the series, New Nightmare oscillates between suggesting the attacks to be merely figments of the dreamer’s imagination and showing the very real pain Freddy inflicts on his victims. To this oscillation, New Nightmare adds a series of earthquakes plaguing Heather’s hometown of Los Angeles (concurrent with the time), providing another plausible explanation for how Hollywood “fantasists” have been harmed/traumatized. Amidst the turmoil, Heather receives an offer from Robert Shaye to star in the film Chase has been working on, to be written and directed by Wes. Her initial skepticism of this offer increases when Chase dies, which police deem to be the result of a car crash but Heather suspects (and the film shows) to have been a murder by Freddy. As Heather mourns Chase, she fears that the next targets will be herself and Dylan. This anxiety increases when Robert tells her that Wes has put Dylan in the script for the new film. She then meets with Wes, who explains that the previous ostensible end to the series has unleashed Freddy into the real world, and that Heather must star in a new entry in order to vanquish him.7 A shot of Wes’s computer further complicates the issue: his script shows the conversation with Heather word-for-word, thereby suggesting that his project is the very text that the viewer is watching, but also stressing the director’s wider proposal about horror as art, namely that society must speak about its nightmares in order to face them. Wes’s fear about Freddy comes true as he attacks Dylan and murders his babysitter Julie (Tracy Middendorf). The film concludes with Heather saving him and herself from Freddy once again, and a final shot of her reading from the New Nightmare script to Dylan ends on an emphatic note of self-reflexivity. Craven uses the scenes of Dylan watching the initial film to emphasize this self-reflexivity throughout New Nightmare. This position appears in an early scene, in which Heather leaves her child with Julie while she goes to do an interview about the tenth anniversary of the Elm Street series. Heather is anxious about leaving Dylan because of the earthquakes and threatening phone calls she has been receiving, with a voice sounding conspicuously like Freddy. After she resolves to go to the junket after all, a long shot captures both Dylan walking down the stairs and a further threat: the television. As Dylan approaches the camera, the television’s prominence on screen left makes a visual connection to him. Although the initial film has not yet appeared on the television at this point, J. Peter Robinson’s sinister score underlines the ominousness of the scene. As Craven will soon highlight, the television, and the film Dylan views on it, will be among the many possible threats to Heather and her family, alongside the earthquake, the phone calls, and Freddy himself.

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The images of the television in New Nightmare exemplify the VIT. Moran argues that the VIT “functions as a hybrid schema, framing a portion of the cinematic diegesis from the imaginary point of view of a simulated video apparatus, but one that is simultaneously material in its evocation of the spectator’s lived experience of how camcorders and VCRs actually work in everyday life.”8 Craven depicts the relevance of the television to the everyday lives of Heather and Dylan, and he will soon use it to watch the initial film. According to Moran, “in instances where cinema constructs a fictional world as if it existed autonomously, directly present to our vision, without source or origin, the VIT reports on that fictional world in the manner of a witness or participant.”9 Although this aspect of New Nightmare complicates its narrative construction, Craven makes comparable use of the VIT as an active participant. By framing the television in relation to Dylan from the beginning of the film, Craven demonstrates its centrality to the existence of Heather’s family. The unique relationship between video and the horror genre furthers the significance of the use of the VIT in New Nightmare. Caetlin Benson-Allott examines the relationship between horror and “video platforms,” a term used to refer to home viewership media from VHS onwards (including streaming and social media).10 Benson-Allott argues that films of the genre were “intensely impacted by and reflect upon the technological, political, and economic cultural conditions of their production.”11 Through the VIT on which Dylan views the initial film, Craven reflects upon the Elm Street series. Although this reflection begins with the films themselves, Dylan’s own relationship to the series also becomes relevant through the visual connection made between him and the VIT. Building on Benson-Allott’s work, Kevin Chabot refers to the narrative use of video in horror as “a videographic ruins.”12 For Chabot, the videographic ruins in horror takes on an historiographic function: “Videotape’s status as ruin lies not only in its positioning as an historical artifact, one that records and preserves traces of the past through time, but also in its convergence of multiple media forms. Video exudes the heterogeneity of the ruin, composed from elements of television, cinema, and computer.”13 The videographic ruins of New Nightmare convey the cinema of the initial film, Craven’s contemporary navigation of it through the genre ten years after, and the bridge between them seen in the VIT Dylan watches. Craven uses the videographic ruins of New Nightmare to address themes introduced in the initial film and continued throughout the series. As Gary Heba explains, the series consistently depicts a clear dichotomy between parents and children: “Parents, police, psychiatrists and other traditional authorities and institutions are coded as ‘other’ from the point of view of the Elm Street youth in the original films. These institutions’ lack of responsiveness and resourcefulness makes them as dangerous to the young people as Freddy Krueger, the ‘monster.’”14 As a result of the danger posed by parents, Pat Gill singles out the

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Elm Street films as being “perhaps the most overt indictment of parental dereliction and disregard” amongst slashers of the 80s.15 The conclusion of the initial film embodies this indictment, as Nancy has to fend for herself against Freddy while she waits for her father to recognize that his daughter is not “imagining” her trauma but literally fighting against it. By the time he arrives, she has already staved Freddy off through a series of booby traps, though he still manages to kill her mother (Ronee Blakley). Craven makes explicit reference to these events in New Nightmare: when Heather runs home after Dylan has been attacked by Freddy in the hospital, the unplugged television shows the scene from the initial film of Nancy calling her father to ask for him to come help her with Freddy. Now that Heather is a mother, she has the responsibilities abdicated by Nancy’s parents in the initial film. The theme of relationships between parents and children seen throughout the Elm Street films takes on particular significance in New Nightmare through the use of video. The presence of the scene between Nancy and her father on Heather’s television demonstrates the videographic ruins of New Nightmare, in which video shows the detritus of the series’ recurring thematic interests. The importance of parental absence to New Nightmare becomes clear early on, after Chase dies on the set of a horror project and leaves Dylan fatherless. As the police come to Heather’s door to inform her of the death, Craven emphasizes the significance of the moment by showing her in a dolly zoom medium close-up. Scenes prior to the shot set up its impact; Heather comes home from the ten-year anniversary interview to the sound of Dylan’s screams. After she runs upstairs to comfort him, he terrifies her even further by quoting Freddy’s rhyming theme from throughout the series: “Never sleep again.” Heather asks Julie if she has let Dylan watch Craven’s original film, which she vigorously denies. In spite of the denial, Dylan’s quotation from the motion picture shows how it has influenced him—even if he has never seen it (Freddy, through video, has become a pop culture fixture, his “presence” outgrowing even the format of his being).16 The absence of Heather and Chase leaves Dylan vulnerable to Freddy, and he becomes all the more susceptible once Chase dies. The depiction of Dylan’s vulnerability due to parental absence brings New Nightmare into thematic territory familiar to the rest of the Elm Street series. New Nightmare also contains a number of visual references to the earlier Elm Street films. This begins in the opening scene, which, like the initial film, shows a pair of hands working on Freddy’s trademark glove. But whereas the hands in the earlier film belong to Freddy, in New Nightmare the glove is merely a prop on the set of the fictional new Elm Street film on which Chase works. The glove begins to move under its own volition and attack the crew, revealing the set to be Heather’s own nightmare and setting up the layered self-reflexivity seen throughout the film. For example, Freddy kills Julie in the hospital by dragging her up the wall onto the ceiling then dropping her,

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much as he does to Tina (Amanda Wyss), the first victim in the initial film. Just before Julie’s death, Heather mysteriously develops a streak of gray hair, much as Nancy does following one of Freddy’s attacks. As a result of such repetitions throughout the Elm Street films, Steve Jones argues that the series as a whole is best understood “as a recurring nightmare, based around persistent motifs and patterns.”17 Vestiges of the Elm Street series in New Nightmare occur not just through the videographic ruins of the actual footage seen on the television, but also the cinematic recreations of indelible images from the earlier films. The allusions to the rest of the Elm Street series show the sort of self-reflexive horror Craven would come to be more well-known for through the Scream series (1996–). Claire Perkins describes New Nightmare as “fundamental” to Scream due to the illustration of the “connection between Craven’s aversion to compulsive, unconsidered sequels and his taste for self-reflexivity.”18 According to Jones, Craven saw much of the Elm Street series as “a bastardization of his original material,” an attitude which heavily informs New Nightmare.19 This perspective becomes clearest in the scene in which Heather has the conversation with Wes about her starring in his new film. He blames Freddy’s resurgence on the repetitiveness of the Elm Street series: “The problem comes when the story dies. It becomes too familiar to people.” While this line of dialogue functions as Craven’s own critique of the sequels, it also suggests the visual and thematic continuities between New Nightmare and the other Elm Street films. The videographic ruins of the series strewn throughout New Nightmare facilitate Craven’s grappling with the effects of his initial film. It might also, of course, highlight Craven’s cynicism and exhaustion with the Hollywood system (at least pre-Scream) and a further meta-reference to how Freddy helped build New Line into part of a future conglomerate (AOL Time Warner). Per Sarah Wharton, in her discussion of the (later and perhaps surprising) horror boom of the early 00s, “The major studios have a historical tendency, going back at least as far as the 1930s and the adoption of the Production Code, towards family-oriented entertainment that purges anything that might be viewed as ‘disreputable’ content.”20 Craven had every right to be concerned that his voice might be minimized. Certainly, the terrible reception given to Samuel Bayer’s glossy A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) remake indicates that the filmmaker was at least prescient about his creation in the hands of other, inferior “artists.” A particularly important theme alluded to throughout the series and picked up in New Nightmare is the role of media in the lives of young people (usually those in their last year of high school or at least still teenaged). In Dream Warriors, Jennifer (Penelope Sudlow), who hopes to become a television actress, dies when Freddy comes out of the television she is watching and pulls her head inside it, electrocuting her. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989) shows Mark’s (Joe Seely) love for comic books, and Freddy kills him by recreating one of his paper adventures in a nightmare. Freddy taunts Mark as he slashes

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him to death: “Told ya comic books was bad for ya!” A similar narrative occurs in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991), the much criticized “conclusion” of the series prior to New Nightmare, as gamer Spencer (Breckin Meyer) is killed when Freddy makes his bad dream look like a Nintendo challenge and slaughters him within this recreated virtual environment. Although intended to signal a “break” from the cartoonish previous films, New Nightmare nonetheless continues the use of media in the series by turning video into a crucial narrative device. After Heather and Dylan return home from Chase’s funeral, she lies awake, wiping away tears of grief. She comes downstairs to find Dylan “escaping” grief by watching fictional horror (in this case her own film). Although the television is unplugged, giving the scene the oneiric qualities prevalent throughout the Elm Street series, its role in the lives of Heather and Wes mimics the function of the initial film in the careers of Langenkamp and Craven: it haunts them, remaining an indelible association for both, the successful “lowbrow” that they cannot reject nor escape from. The VIT of New Nightmare reminds the viewer that the initial film endures as a monster beyond Craven’s control—there will always be someone, somewhere, demanding another sequel, and with that a further “debate” about whether these motion pictures are “valuable” for society.21 nightmarish censorship

If Craven’s use of the VIT facilitates the interrogation of his relationship to the Elm Street series, a topic of equal or perhaps greater importance is his view of attitudes towards film violence. Reynold Humphries describes New Nightmare as “remarkable for the way it represents the repression inherent to our societies, where ‘repression’ condenses the sexual and the social, indeed shows us how it is impossible to separate the two.”22 Indeed, like its predecessors in the Elm Street series, New Nightmare depicts the deeply personal repression children experience from their parents, which facilitates Freddy’s attacks (in this case, Dylan is told not to watch horror films, which per Craven’s suggestions only makes him more inclined to do so, while the rejection of “bad” media fuels the Freddy legend even further). But unlike the other films, Craven combines this depiction of parental relationships with commentary on cultural perspectives on the violence of horror films and its effect on children. The depiction of Dylan watching the initial film on video facilitates the critique of moral panic over horror. The relevance of societal attitudes towards horror movies to New Nightmare becomes clear just after Heather first leaves Dylan alone with Julie. As Heather’s limo driver brings her to the interview, a shot of him looking at her suspiciously through the rearview mirror indicates his recognition: “You played that girl?”

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Figure 13.2  One of horror cinema’s most famous “final girls,” actress Heather Langenkamp, returned to her most famous role in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

She sits uncomfortably in the backseat as the stranger describes scenes from the initial film, showing the viewer how it endures in Heather’s life. The interview then shows how this endurance affects her relationship with Dylan. When she tells the interviewer that she has enjoyed working more in television after the Elm Street series since she can spend more time with her son, the interviewer quickly moves to asking if her role in the films has influenced her mothering: “Would you let him see one of your movies?” After showing Dylan together with the television, the interview scene highlights the threat of him using it to watch the Elm Street series. The fantastical fear of Freddy attacking Heather and her family overlaps with very real fears of children being negatively influenced by watching horror—at least in the eyes of those who choose not to engage with the genre beyond the tabloids or scathing “highbrow” reviews. The blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction in New Nightmare also epitomizes the importance of the gothic to Craven throughout his career. According to Kendall R. Phillips, gothic film and literature is concerned with “the thin line that exists between the world of day, and with it reason, rationality, normalcy, and the world of night, and with it superstition, illusion, madness.”23 Phillips argues that the “blurring of lines between waking and dreaming throughout the Elm Street series” situates it “within the broad parameters of the gothic and the journey between the diurnal and nocturnal world.”24 The real consequences of Freddy’s attacks in dreams exemplify the interest in troubling the dichotomy of day and night characteristic of the gothic. As Phillips explains, the self-reflexivity of New Nightmare intensifies the problematization of binaries: “The complicated layers of mirroring—and thus the complicated and intersecting lines dividing dream from reality and

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film from film—accentuate the uncertainty produced in the original film.”25 The uncertainty produced by Freddy’s oneiric killings throughout the series increases through Craven’s reflections on his relationship to it. Perhaps the most significant instance of the gothic blurring of boundaries in New Nightmare occurs in Dylan’s pediatrician, Dr Heffner. Heather takes Dylan to the doctor after a scene in which she wakes up from her own nightmare, where the child attacks her with knives bandaged to his fingers (closely resembling Freddy’s glove), to find him pacing in the kitchen while reciting the franchise’s famous theme. After Heather answers the ringing phone, Freddy’s tongue juts out from the bottom of the phone to lick her, reprising an iconic jump scare from the initial film (Craven is surely satirizing the repetition inherent in any sequel here, something that he also did with Scream 3 in 2000). When Heather picks up a writhing and screaming Dylan from the floor, a long shot places the staticky television next to them in the frame, again taking a prominent place in relation to Dylan’s fears. Dr Heffner confirms the prominence of the television during the appointment. Although Chase has just died, Dr Heffner initially turns to Heather’s role in the Elm Street series as an explanation: “You haven’t showed him any of the films you’ve made, have you?” Dr Heffner’s namesake highlights the significance of her character as a connection between fiction and reality. As Kim Newman notes, the pediatrician is named for Richard D. Heffner,26 who, from 1974–1994, headed the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), the association responsible for film ratings in the US.27 Craven’s conflicts over ratings stemmed back to The Last House on the Left, which the director and producer Sean S. Cunningham claim to have released by splicing the banner for an R-rated film onto their original cut, which otherwise would have received an X rating.28 Heffner and Craven clashed over the initial Elm Street film due in part to the scene showing the murder of Nancy’s boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp), in which the infamous upward gush of blood led to the possibility of the film being rated X.29 Although Craven was able to release the film with an R rating after edits, he continued to view Heffner as a tyrannical censor, calling him “the kind of man who will not allow a certain kind of view to be expressed, period.”30 James Kendrick describes Craven’s struggle to obtain the R rating as illustrative of “the necessity of the rating as a commodity that independent producers needed if they hoped to be viable in the marketplace.”31 The reflection on the Elm Street series seen in New Nightmare incorporates the conflict with Heffner through the character named for him, who likewise expresses skepticism about the violence in Craven’s work, and a childlike association between “real” violence and its “reel” counterpart. Indeed, Heffner had a particular interest in using the ratings system to protect children, an important point for understanding New Nightmare. As Stephen Vaughn explains, “Heffner thought of rating board members as surrogate parents.”32 This attitude intensified after the release of Friday the 13th

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(Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), which received an R rating despite Heffner believing that the blood and gore warranted an X; Kendrick refers to this experience as fundamental to Heffner’s “renewed efforts to take a harder stand” on new horror films.33 Craven was highly dismissive of Heffner’s belief in the importance of protecting the young through ratings: “these agendas often have to do with ill-defined but passionately held notions of saving children from having their minds corrupted by films.”34 New Nightmare captures this misguided notion of parental protectiveness through Dr Heffner’s instinct to blame the Elm Street films for Dylan’s woes, ignoring genuine trauma (such as the death of the child’s father) and instead focusing on a reliable “lowbrow” excuse for untoward behavior. Craven’s conflicts with Heffner also bore some resemblance to issues with British media panic over cinematic violence, which likewise targeted Craven’s work. In the early 80s, a number of horror movies (including The Last House on the Left) were targeted by the British media and authorities in their outrage over so-called “video nasties.”35 This led to the legislative passing of the 1985 Video Recordings Act, which limited the circulation of films designated to be especially problematic.36 Benson-Allott notes the medium specificity of the video nasty campaign, arguing that the term “condemns the videotape platform rather than the content of specific tapes.”37 The relationship between horror movies and video is thereby essential to understanding New Nightmare. This becomes all the clearer when Heather returns to the hospital after being attacked by Freddy, hoping to protect Dylan. She is greeted by Dr Heffner,

Figure 13.3  Actor Robert Englund briefly steps out of the makeup for his seventh film as Freddy Krueger

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who will not allow Heather inside due to her son being in intensive care. Dr Heffner continues to insist that the Elm Street films are to blame for Dylan’s issues, echoing the belief in the primacy of protecting children shown by her namesake: “My concerns are simply for the welfare of your son.” Dr Heffner’s insinuation becomes even more insulting given that it comes immediately after Freddy’s attack on Heather, reminding her (and the viewer) that he (much like the parents of the first film, who simply will not listen) is the primary threat to her family rather than the films in which she has appeared. The interweaving of dreams and reality seen throughout the Elm Street series becomes thus entangled with the censorial threats Craven faced throughout his career. Phillips cites the initial Elm Street film as a key example of Craven’s careerlong project to show that “the body stands at the complex intersection of reality and illusion and is often wrapped up in the blurring of the boundary between the two.”38 The addition of video to this gothic intersection affords Craven the unique opportunity to reflect on his own career, in terms of his relationship to the Elm Street series, his own success (pivotal to the building of New Line, but dismissed within the wider pop culture as “lowbrow” or “trash”), and his battles with censors. Thus, New Nightmare combines satiric commentaries on the horror genre with the gothic conflicts between life and dreams that are central to the Elm Street series. Dylan’s home viewership of the initial film in New Nightmare’s VIT anchors this combination, bringing together both Craven’s contributions to the series and controversies over violence in his films, as well as the complexities of being a celebrated, and respected, genre figure to some, but a more notorious helmer of “video nasties” to others. Regardless, the director concludes by arguing that if society represses its nightmares, refusing to speak about them in the safety of fiction, then it will be a more terrifying place as a result. In the end, Craven’s return to Elm Street combines the nightmares of the series with frightening introspection.

notes   1. Shaye previously had cameos in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1986), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988), and Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991).   2. For clarity, I will refer to the actors by their last names and the characters by their first names throughout the chapter.   3. Mary Whitehouse, “Time to Face Responsibility,” in Karl French, ed., Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 61.   4. James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 164.   5. The 1990s was also the time in which debates around violent videos, and their consumption by children, was renewed in Great Britain, where Craven had earlier seen his The Last House on the Left (1972) banned outright. Petley recites some of the (sensationalistic) headlines of

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this era, and quotes from then Home Secretary Michael Howard during a debate on the topic, which the director would doubtlessly have been alerted to as well and, one presumes, possibly used as a topical inspiration: “A look at the newspaper headlines on the day of the debate itself is revealing: ‘Censorship of ‘‘Video Nasties’’ to be Tightened by Howard’ (Independent), ‘Howard Curb on Violent Videos’ (Telegraph), ‘Howard Gets Tough on Video Access’ (Times), ‘Howard Purges Horror Videos with ‘‘Not in Front of the Children’’ Rating’ (Express), ‘Video Nasty Blitz’ (Mirror), ‘Howard Lays Down Censorship Hurdles to Halt Violent Videos’ (Guardian), and ‘Clamp on Video Nasties’ (Sun).” Julian Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 91.   6. Craven is credited as a co-writer of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, along with Bruce Wagner, Frank Darabont, and Chuck Russell. However, New Nightmare is the first film in the series Craven returned to direct after the initial film.   7. Freddy appeared to have died at the end of Part 6 of the series, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare.   8. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video, 167.   9. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video, 181. 10. Caetlin Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 2. 11. Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 16. 12. Kevin Chabot, “Tape: Videographic Ruin and the Lure of the Tangible,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, No. 2 (2020): 2. 13. Chabot, “Tape,” 2. 14. Gary Heba, “Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series,” The Journal of Popular Film and Television 23, No. 3 (1995): 106–15. 15. Pat Gill, “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family,” Journal of Film and Video (54, No. 4 (2002): 26. 16. Indeed, it might be worth noting that the “video nasty” scandal itself actually inspired future notable filmmakers rather than having the presumed impact of copycat crime, indicating the unavoidable cultural influence and impact of the medium, which Craven deals with in his New Nightmare (whether present or not, Heather cannot shield her son from the pop-presence of Freddy thanks to his own afterlife on VHS)—as per Walker: “Neil Marshall, for example, claimed that the video nasty, The Evil Dead, was a major influence on Dog Soldiers . . . and Simon Pegg noted that the zombie films of George A. Romero—that were first brought to Pegg’s attention when he was at school during the video nasties era—heavily influenced Shaun of the Dead . . .” Johnny Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 39. 17. Steve Jones, “If Nancy Doesn’t Wake Up Screaming: The Elm Street Series as Recurring Nightmare,” in Horror Franchise Cinema, edited by Mark McKenna and William Proctor (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022), 81. 18. Claire Perkins, “The Scre4m Trilogy,” in Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches, edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis (London, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 91. 19. Jones, “If Nancy Doesn’t Wake Up Screaming,” 83. 20. Sarah Wharton, “Welcome to the (Neo) Grindhouse, Sex, Violence and the Indie Film,” in American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, edited by Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 201. 21. One need only see the lack of appreciation for (arguably more complex) horror films, including those of Craven, on lists such as those compiled by the BFI, to see that this question remains potent and relevant.

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22. Reynold Humphries, The American Horror Film: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 162. 23. Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 73–4. 24. Phillips, Dark Directions, 77–8. 25. Phillips, Dark Directions, 84. 26. Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film, 1968–88 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 386. 27. Stephen Vaughn, Freedom and Entertainment: Rating the Movies in an Age of New Media (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7. 28. Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 171. 29. James Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 151. 30. Quoted in Sean Mitchell, “The X Rating Gets its Day in Court,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1990. Accessed January 11, 2023. Available from: https://www.latimes.com/archives/ la-xpm-1990-06-21-ca-535-story.html. 31. Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed, 151. 32. Vaughn, Freedom and Entertainment, 41. 33. Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed, 150. 34. Wes Craven, “MPAA: The Horror in My Life,” Films in Review 47, no. 9–10 (1996): 34–7. 35. Michael Fiddler, “Playing Funny Games in The Last House on the Left: The Uncanny and the ‘Home Invasion’ Genre,” Crime, Media, Culture 9, no. 3 (2013): 288. 36. James Kendrick, “A Nasty Situation,” in Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, ed. Steffen Hantke (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 155. 37. Benson-Allott, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens, 99. 38. Phillips, Dark Directions, 81.

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14

Not Quite Blacula: Locating Vampire in Brooklyn Richard Sheppard

R

eleased in 1995 by Paramount Pictures, Vampire in Brooklyn holds an unusual place in Craven’s oeuvre, the vampire film resurgence of the 1990s, and in the filmography of its leading man, Eddie Murphy. On its release, just before Halloween, when horror films traditionally receive increased attention, the film barely managed to attract an audience—eventually recouping just $20 million dollars1 against a budget of $16 million—and earning many negative reviews.23 Murphy’s career had been hamstrung by such previous, commercially unsuccessful projects as Beverly Hills Cop III (John Landis, 1994) and Harlem Nights (Eddie Murphy, 1989). Vampire in Brooklyn would not be the blockbuster that Murphy presumably hoped for, with The New York Times noting that his shift into the horror genre was an indicator of further decline: “Eddie Murphy as the living dead: that’s not a bad description of his career, a situation Vampire in Brooklyn is not likely to change.”3 However, Craven had also suffered from the vagaries of critical and commercial responses to his film work over the last decade, although, unlike Murphy, the social commentary that had punctuated his early work had not necessarily been diminished. In describing the subtext of The Last House on the Left (1972), Robin Wood summarised that not only was the commentary obvious, but it was also inescapable: “The film offers no easily identifiable parallels to Vietnam [. . .] Instead, it analyzes the nature and conditions of violence and sees them as inherent in the American situation. Craven sees to it that the audience cannot escape the implications.”4 Indeed, a constant theme of Craven’s work could be argued to be that the on-screen horrors are secondary to the social commentary underneath. For instance, the nuclear test is far more barbaric in and of itself than the mutants it creates in The Hills Have Eyes (1977), just as the conspiracy of silence in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) proves

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Figure 14.1  Vampire in Brooklyn was not the critical or commercial success that star Eddie Murphy (pictured) hoped for

to be even more harmful, in the long-run, than the return of the film’s iconic killer, Freddy Krueger, to slaughter a handful of teenagers. Craven’s output in the late 1980s and early 1990s had continued this trend, with Shocker (1989) taking on the barbarity of capital punishment through the avatar of a killer who cannot be successfully executed, thus maintaining his profile and legend and leading to further trauma. In Shocker we see that not only does capital punishment not work, but only further devalues human life—the antagonist, Horace Pinker (played by Mitch Pileggi, who would play another sociopath for Craven in Vampire in Brooklyn), only gains strength and a higher body count after his barbaric and prolonged “execution.” It might be a heavy-handed way of claiming that capital punishment does not, in fact, deter violence, but the message is, nonetheless, there. Craven also tackled race relations in The People Under the Stairs, highlighting the growing wealth disparity between the slums and the landlords5 in a Los Angeles that had grown increasingly bifurcated during the policies of Reaganomics in the 1980s. The film arrived in the wake of the brutal attack on Rodney King in the same year by members of Los Angeles Police Department. In 1994, the year after missile strikes on Iraqi targets were shown live on CNN, Freddy Krueger may have seemed passé, but Craven tackled the effects of screen violence, and a failure to openly “discuss” horror, in his more critically acclaimed Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. By marrying Craven’s socially conscious sensibility to Murphy’s comedic talent and extant, if fading, “star power,”6 Vampire in Brooklyn should have perhaps been more successful than it was. So, what happened? In this chapter,

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I will look at how the film’s genesis came during a time of a revival in big-budget vampire films (spearheaded by the 1991 success of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula), which potentially worked against the reception of Vampire in Brooklyn. I shall argue, referring back to an earlier point in the genre’s history, that Craven’s effort belongs to a tradition of Black horror films that dealt with social issues in a way that Gothic melodramas like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) did not. In doing so, Vampire in Brooklyn will be argued to have more depth, and indeed more worth, than has perhaps been previously considered. Whilst there have been many academic articles about Craven, few have mentioned Vampire in Brooklyn. The recurring critique of the film by critics at the time was that it failed as both a Wes Craven (i.e., “horror”) film and as an Eddie Murphy (i.e., “comedy”) vehicle.7 8 The film does not even rate a mention in Caetlin Benson-Allott’s memorial to Craven for Film Quarterly.9 In Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film,10 author Kendall Phillips skilfully dissects the influence of the gothic on Craven’s oeuvre. Yet Vampire in Brooklyn, which features that most monolithic gothic archetype, the vampire, is dealt with in just two paragraphs. Robin R. Means-Coleman’s superlative Horror Noire11 remains one of the few academic studies to engage with the film outside of its context as a stumbling block, or footnote, in the careers of director and star. The film comes in between two films that would be among perhaps the director’s best regarded: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996). The former, by scrutinising the business and ethical incentives of the horror-franchise trend, arguably concluded one era of the “slasher” genre that had begun with the success of Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). Meanwhile, the latter reinvented the same cycle by providing a meta-narrative in which the characters were not only aware of the slasher film as an in-universe topic, having grown up under its influence, but were also alert to its codes and conventions. To make a vampire film, for a director who had usually avoided such codified and traditional figures as this (preferring to invent his own mythologies such as Freddy, the cannibal family of The Hills Have Eyes, Horace Pinker in Shocker, and Ghostface) may thus be seen as a daring misstep. As Muir points out: [Craven] usually finds horror in families and “real-life” scenarios, not in the traditional venues of the supernatural. Even Freddy and the Peytraud12 were the supernatural avengers of unusual capabilities rather than traditional ghouls such as vampires, werewolves13 and mummies.14 However, whilst showcasing the traditional gothic trappings that make the Craven/Murphy effort a “vampire” film, it is also as topical and adept at

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playing with these conventions—at least as much, one might argue, as any of the director’s projects that precede and succeed it. c o m i n g t o a m e r i c a — t h e b l a c k va m p i r e as outsider

One of the primary hallmarks of the Black vampire film, in stark contrast to its more mainstream equivalent, is its preoccupation with the clash between the contemporary and the past. To date, there has not been a “period” Black vampire film of any note. The narrative drive of a film like Blacula (William Crain, 1972) is the juxtaposition of Mamuwalde (William Marshall), an eighteenthcentury African aristocrat, against the mores and styles of 1970s Los Angeles. The other urtext for Black vampire films, Ganja and Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), has a more subtle but equally pointed message about the past haunting the present—Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is made into a vampire by infection from a ceremonial dagger that belonged to an apparently mythical nation of African vampires, the Myrthians.15 16 The reason for the Black vampire set against the modern world (as opposed to the Victorian) may be to accentuate how much of an outsider they (the Black community) are within America. Mamuwalde not only has to contend with those who are hunting him (as did Lugosi and Lee), but also crooked cops, street hustlers, and the flotsam and jetsam that make up the demimonde of early 70s Los Angeles. He wears the typical garb of the classical vampire—evening dress, which is here thrown into contrast against the garish threads of the pimps and prostitutes he suborns to his coterie. His manner of speech is mannered and archaic, greatly influenced by the fact that the lead actor William Marshall’s background was in the theatre, specifically in Shakespearean roles.17 It was this gravitas, and distinctive, bass voice that caused the producers of Blacula to rewrite the character as verbose and articulate, again contrasting Mamuwalde against the 70s slang-heavy argot. As Novotny Lawrence articulates: His unfamiliarity with contemporary modes of dress and speech emphasizes his otherworldliness among his modern-day counterparts. Blacula has arrived dressed in an outdated black ensemble, topped off with a cape. He displays his aristocratic background by ordering champagne instead of beer, and when he speaks, he is extremely articulate and does not use slang like the characters that surround him.18 Vampire in Brooklyn undertakes a similar idea, albeit through the postmodern lens Wes Craven would go on to use to wider critical acceptance in Scream— for instance, the film draws on the mythology, and character, of Blacula but

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subverts familiarity with that particular text. Certainly, Murphy’s character is as equally articulate and eye-catching as Mamuwalde, with a taste for fine clothes and a disdain for the modern world, complete with a de rigueur subplot of lost love. However, the film is not a remake or reboot of Blacula, but instead a commentary on how the society Mumawalde and then Maximillian move within deals with change (much as the world between Halloween and Scream is shown to have changed). As Julius (Kadeem Hardison) tells Maximillian shortly after they meet, “Hey, easy, bro. You ain’t got to pull that Blacula shit with me!” Mamuwalde is cursed with being a vampire, and in a very direct nod to transnational slavery, he is transported from Africa to America in a chained box, lying prone and cramped in a fashion that cannot help but recall Alexander Falconbridge’s horrifying first-hand account of conditions on a slave ship.19 Prior to this transportation, Mamuwalde has been petitioning Count Dracula to abandon the slave trade on moral grounds. Dracula not only turns Mamuwalde into a slave, both by transporting him in chains to the New World and making him indebted to bloodlust, but also indulges in the common slaver’s practice of giving their captive a new name: in this case Blacula. The antique dealers who find the coffin further commodify Mamuwalde by unconsciously referring to him as just another piece of cargo, a commodity like the tables, chairs, and wardrobes they have just brought from Dracula’s estate in Transylvania. Maximillian, on the other hand, is master throughout, with more kinship towards the classically white European vampire than the African-Americans he meets. The film informs us that not only is Maximillian “born” a vampire, rather than having been made one along the lines of the classic sire/ offspring relationship that is part of the classical vampire myth, but also that vampires are a different, superior race than humans, perhaps comparable to Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942). Contrast their modes of arrival: Mamuwalde as a slave, Maximillian as master of his own ship. Like Dracula, the latter arrives as the sole passenger, implying the freedom and control of a conqueror. He is not there to help his fellow man, or redeem Black culture, but to fulfil his desires in a broken-down city. As Robin R. Means-Coleman describes in Horror Noire: “While Blacula was inspired by the wave of interest in Black nationalism and connection with the African “motherland,” Vampire absented itself from Black political movements, opting to signal its connection to Black culture through its inner-city location.”20 Maximillian later has the ability to shape reality, such as turning his rented flat from a hovel to a fully appointed, modern bachelor pad. The fact that he takes no such effort in changing his ship into something more suitable, or making it wholly invisible, is part of the glee the character takes in impinging his eternal, classic sensibility onto the mid-1990s. Mamuwalde is disappointed with how little humanity has achieved, despite fulfilling his greatest dream of ending the slave trade,21 22 and sees only the seedy side of the city. His experience is that of the slave; his

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liberation from the chains that hold him only represents the route to more suffering. Maximillian is a more insidious albeit self-confident new arrival, and we can see in the aforementioned transformation of his flat that he is the harbinger of not only death, but also gentrification (note that he also arrives in a Giuliani-era New York, rather than Blacula’s Los Angeles—at this point still reeling from Rodney King and the subsequent riots). Mamuwalde is cursed to kill, helpless to do otherwise until his own death, whereas Maximillian kills primarily for fun, and only secondarily for sustenance. As I shall discuss later in this chapter, it is Maximillian’s predilection for killing, and his choice of victims, that adds an interesting racial component to his character’s Blackness. Given Maximillian’s power, it is possible to interpret his as the ultimate dream of emancipation. A character of the past, but not chained to the past, and with full agency, and even superiority in the Western world. However, this interpretation only achieves a partial understanding of the character. The irony of Blacula is that Mamuwalde is an anti-slavery advocate who is then forced to make slaves to reinforce his own past and present. With every victim he takes, Mamuwalde becomes more enslaved to Dracula, and with the creation of vampire slaves of his own (who presumably will create further captives), he resurrects the system that was abolished while he slept, and which tortured and killed so many of his fellow Africans. His own resurrection in the modern world threatens a recursive return to the system he abhorred as a mortal man— a new spin on the eternally anguished vampire mythos.23 Maximillian, however, appears to have more control over his actions. He hunts for sport rather than necessity, and rescues another character, Julius, from financial slavery to the Italian mob, only to make him a ghoul, a literal slave to himself. Julius’s disintegration from human to ghoul, complete with decaying flesh, can be seen as a vivid depiction of how slavery is a corrupting force to both the body and the body politic in the world of Vampire in Brooklyn, and is worth touching on further. His eventual “redemption,” on picking up the ring of the fleeing Maximillian and being transformed into a vampire himself (and thus being initiated into the “master” caste), regaining bodily autonomy, is a clear indicator that abusive cycles, rooted in the past, repeat themselves. Julius’s coercion of his Uncle Silas (John Witherspoon) into being his chauffer is yet another nail in the coffin for emancipation, and a satirical, sharp way for Craven to conclude his film. “There’s a new vampire in Brooklyn,” Julius purrs to Silas at the end of the film, and yet, as indicated by his adoption of Maximillian’s car, dress-sense and Bahamian lilt, it will always be the same old “vampire” enforcing the same old horrible traditions. For all the differences in the two vampires, across both films, they are unable to escape this cycle of slavery and tyranny. Julius has obtained “capital,” which was his dilemma at the beginning of the film, where, without money and with life-threatening debt, he lost his house and cultural currency, and as Karl Marx reminds us in a famous

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quote, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”24 Indeed, Craven’s work, from The Last House on the Left to A Nightmare on Elm Street, frequently argues that violence begats violence and that an entire nation, or even a small town, built on conflict and horror, can never really avoid its own past returning to haunt it. With Vampire in Brooklyn, the director returns to this theme. The struggle that was central to Mamuwalde’s existence has now become the ironic punchline. As one white victim tells Maximillian, “I understand the Negro people. I understand how you’ve been chained by the oppression of white capitalistic society.”25 Maximillian, as a new slave-owner (and creator), hasn’t been chained by anyone, and the capitalistic society is the one he now thrives in, buying the home of a ship inspector, Silas, and making him dependent through non-supernatural means. In the first scene, not only does Maximillian’s ship arrive in Red Hook harbour, but it destroys Silas’s workplace,26 and presumably, his employment. Silas, played by John Witherspoon, who was a long-term collaborator of the late Richard Pryor, acts both as comic foil to Julius and Maximillian and as a link between Brooklyn and its historic past as a culturally Black neighborhood. victims and villains

If Vampire in Brooklyn’s antagonist, Maximillian, exists outside of the structure of racial heritage that defines Blacula’s Mamuwalde, then it is possible, through a study of his victims and position as a self-actualised individual, to add a further curious dimension to his character. As previously touched upon, with reference to Robin Wood, Wes Craven was a director who consistently used political issues as both text and subtext in his films. As a filmmaker living and working in Los Angeles in the early 1990s,27 he would of course have been aware of the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD in 1991, and the shooting of Latasha Harlins by a Korean grocer two weeks later, in the aftermath of which the shop-owner paid a fine, did minimal probation, and no prison time.28 This increasingly violent milieu reached its apex with the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which turned the attention of the world on a city divided along tense, racial lines. Two years later the city saw the trial of O. J. Simpson. Simpson was charged, and later acquitted, with the murder of his ex-wife and a mutual friend outside their home. The fact that Simpson was Black, and his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, was white, added a (perhaps unavoidable) racial tension to the coverage of the trial and the legal case itself. The aftermath of the case, including when the chief investigating officer, Mark Fuhrman, was revealed to be racist,29 led to a supposed “cleaning up” of the LAPD. The cultural effects were more subtle, however. If we see Vampire

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in Brooklyn as a post-O. J. Simpson film (“post” in the sense of the killings, rather than the outcome of the trial), there is much to be read into Murphy’s character, his victims, and the portrayal of the police. Greater still is the moral ambiguity that was stirred up by Simpson’s acquittal, which one might see in retrospect as less a triumph of the American court system than an exercise in the utility of reasonable doubt. Like Simpson, Maximillian is a successful Black man, who believes himself to transcend his race through accomplishment and birth right. Interviews with Simpson before the trial frequently mention how Simpson saw himself as a hierarchy of traits, each with its own systemic privilege. The journalist Robert Lipsyte recalled, in 1994, meeting Simpson back in the late 1960s: My biggest accomplishment is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man. I was at a wedding, my wife and a few friends were the only Negroes there, and I overheard a lady say, “Look, there’s O. J. Simpson and some niggers. Isn’t that weird?” That sort of thing hurts me, even though it’s what I strive for, to be a man first.30 This liminal space that Simpson inhabited during the peak of his fame is similar to the position that Maximillian finds himself in upon arrival in America. The character chooses to come to America to find his bride,31 and as we have seen in the previous comparison with Mamuwalde of Blacula, he is the privileged captain of a large ship, and not cargo. His first victims are the multiracial crew of the boat that he has coerced into taking him from the Caribbean to Brooklyn. Similarly, his next actions are equally ambiguous—he kills two Italian-American mafioso and enslaves a young Black male. Whilst Maximillian may refer to Julius as “his ghoul,” the possessive noun is telling, as is the menial labour that Maximillian sets him too. And yet this is not necessarily because Julius is Black. Indeed, as Maximillian explains to him, it is because he is morally compromised (“You’re a liar, a thief and a cheat . . . that’s what I liked about you”). Maximillian does not conceptualize race—an idea th at, for a while at least, O. J. Simpson attempted to replicate. As a football player, he was part of a team, and judged mainly by his contribution to that team and his outstanding sporting ability, which led to his eventual “mainstream” acceptance (i.e., into white suburban living rooms). Thus, Maximillian’s choice of victims gains an interesting dimension when read through the questionable notion of post-racialism (if such a term even exists, but I use this extremely broadly and not without irony). In one of Vampire in Brooklyn’s most interesting scenes, he feeds upon a tall, statuesque blonde woman in a park.32 The woman, played by Jerry Hall, has a strong Southern accent, and (as discussed in the previous section, with the use of her quote) she describes him as “the negro,” turning him into a permanently oppressed minority. However, to Maximillian, to whom race is something to

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transcend, including in his actualization as an immortal, this is very much the wrong thing to say, and the affected performance and the absurdity of Hall’s character is there to be mocked and her death perhaps even celebrated. When Maximillian kills her, he may also be killing the reminder that the Black individual is subject wholly to the vagaries of society, or as a product of historical inequality. Historically the vampire is an individual associated with status and wealth, and the first literary examples of the modern vampire—Lord Ruthven, Count Dracula, and Sir Francis Varney—were not only above the petty needs of working a job or paying rent, they were also above the bourgeois obligations to live any sort of ethical existence. This depiction is concurrent with Karl Marx seeing capital itself as a vampire, feasting on the poor. However, Simpson, as evidenced by the quote in The New York Times, had also achieved a degree of superiority that placed him in a cultural milieu where the committing of a crime, or even the accusation of committing a crime, could be “bought off.” It is thus easy to see how Maximillian could stand in for Simpson during the sequence where he brutally murders the woman in the park, and how that could have resonated with an audience that had watched minute-by-minute detail of the trial on television. Even more resonant would have been the unusual sensation of seeing a man that a lot of the country, and even a sizable minority of his own race, believed to have murdered two people (one a tall, statuesque blonde woman returning home to her own luxury, much like Jerry Hall’s character in Vampire in Brooklyn). The idea that criminal actions would have repercussions,

Figure 14.2  Vampire in Brooklyn star Angela Bassett would work with Wes Craven again in Music of the Heart (1999)

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whilst naïve, would not be an uncommon expectation. Seeing a guilty man as innocent would have skewed that world view, and Craven gives Murphy free rein in encapsulating this new, modern order, including in a sequence in which he shapeshifts into a drunken Evangelical Preacher called Pauly.33 The protagonist of the film, and the subject of Murphy’s doomed infatuation, Rita (Angela Bassett) has experienced a sequence of unusual events and seeks spiritual advice from her pastor. Maximillian, as Preacher Pauly, espouses a sermon detailing that what is considered by conventional wisdom to be “bad” (greed, lust, et cetera) is in fact now “good”—and race is irrelevant to modern times. Maximillian gets to this point through first evoking duality (“there’s two sides to every story!”). Or, to put this in another way, one that might have been even more familiar to the viewing public of the time; Maximillian is here discussing the binary nature of ethics; that is, without evil, good has no definition, and vice versa. A timely reminder, perhaps, that there is a case for the defence, and a case for the prosecution, transcending the entire concept, within this troubled era, of “guilty” and “innocent.” fa n g s f o r t h e m e m o r i e s

Vampire in Brooklyn, as noted in the introduction, was a film that failed to find its audience on its release, and critical reappraisal of the film has been sporadic. However, as this chapter has endeavored to show, it is highly significant in terms of its place in Black Horror cinema history, as well as speaking directly

Figure 14.3  Despite some extravagant special effects, Vampire in Brooklyn never took a bite from the box office

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to a country that was undergoing a time of cultural reflection due to an increasingly violent racial divide that culminated in the arrest of one of America’s most high-profile sporting celebrities, a man who considered himself “postracial” when accused of a crime by an infrastructure that, his team argued, was still inherently racist. O. J. Simpson, much like Maximillian the vampire, believed his own status could transcend his crimes within a culture that, one might argue, had come to value celebrity and wealth as paramount, regardless of the skin color behind such privilege. As maintained throughout this chapter, Wes Craven’s work usually contained some aspect of social commentary, and the same level of thought has, arguably, gone into Vampire in Brooklyn as in even his most celebrated films (along with New Nightmare, this project also instigates his “postmodern” phase—note how Blacula is referenced in the dialogue) —and if Maximillian can “get away with it” (creating further immortals) is this film perhaps not just as prophetic, given the Simpson connotations, as The Last House on the Left is to its own “American nightmare?” The very fact that this story does not engage directly with the same Black issues as Blacula and Ganja and Hess do is itself perhaps a commentary on the challenges and even impossibility of a post-racial America, although this is lost somewhat in a film that is tied very closely to the gothic tradition and admittedly jarring shifts of tone between comedy and horror. Maximillian is primarily a vampire, with the cultural legacy of such, rather than a Black man who has been cursed with vampirism, but his fate is still in his not realising this. Despite his ability to shapeshift into a white person (the Italian-American character of Guido), cementing his position as a figure to whom race is not a fixed concept, he is unaware of how other people see him, even slaughtering a woman who fails to understand this. However, at the end of the film his experience is much the same; hounded, evicted, and killed by the police. No matter how much Maximillian believes himself to be free of the cultural burden of his Otherness (and “other” race), that is not the perception of other people. It is worth noting that this is the second of Craven’s mid-period films that hinges upon race relations and colonialism within the Americas. In 1988, Craven adapted the nonfiction account of Harvard anthropologist Wade Davis’s experiences in Haitian Vodou culture in The Serpent and The Rainbow (1987).34 The film is a very loose adaptation, even to the point of changing the main character’s name from Wade Davis to Dennis Alan (played by Bill Pullman). Alan is an outsider in Haiti, a WASP academic with an empiricist’s world view that cannot conceive of an explanation for the zombies outside of the scientific. Instead, in his colonial arrogance, he sees the zombie powder only for its benefits to modern Western medicine, rather than as a component of a well-established belief system that he does not understand. Typically for a horror narrative, his lack of belief is punished, and he is humbled by the end of the narrative. Maximillian,

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like Alan, is a stranger in a new world, and both pay the price for their cultural misunderstandings and rapacious nature. They think themselves both above the world they find themselves in, and yet—in the end—lie hopelessly outside of the hidden America they narrowly avoid death in. notes   1. See: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl309954049/weekend/.   2. “Eddie Murphy, whose career is seriously in need of reviving, should have thought twice before entrusting it to an amateur-night screenplay stapled together from a story by himself and his brothers.” Roger Ebert, “Reviews: Vampire in Brooklyn” (October 27, 2005). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: https://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/vampire-in-brooklyn-1995.   3. “The film was directed by the horror master Wes Craven (‘Nightmare on Elm Street’), and it turns out to be an Eddie Murphy-Wes Craven movie that is not funny or scary. Now that’s a nightmare.” Caryn James, “Single Black Vampire, New in Town,” New York Times (October 27, 1995), Section 3, 3.   4. Barry Keith Grant (ed.) and Robin Wood, Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 189.   5. The film is essentially a fleshing out of the 1981 Saturday Night Live sketch “Prose and Cons,” in which Murphy’s character Tyrone Greene punctuates a behind-bars poetry recital with the repeated cry “Kill my landlord!”   6. And from the first few seconds we are reminded of who is really in charge here—the opening credits read “An Eddie Murphy Production,” then “A Wes Craven Film,” then “Eddie Murphy.”   7. “Neither all that scary nor all that hilarious, Vampire in Brooklyn falls directly between the two, into the valley of mediocrity.” Marc Savlov, “Movies; Vampire in Brooklyn,” Austin Chronicle (October 27, 1995). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: http://www. austinchronicle.com/events/film/1995-10-27/vampire-in-brooklyn.   8. “Considering it was directed by ‘Elm Street’ creator Wes Craven, ‘Vampire’ isn’t stunningly scary, or particularly atmospheric.” Desson Howe, “Film Review; Vampire in Brooklyn,” Washington Post (October 27, 1995). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/ vampireinbrooklynrhowe_c03423.htm.   9. Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Wes Craven: Thinking Through Horror,” Film Quarterly (Vol. 69, No. 2, December 1, 2015), 74–6. 10. Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 95–6. 11. Robin R Means-Coleman, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011). 12. The Tonton Macoute antagonist of the The Serpent and the Rainbow, played by Zakes Mokae, repurposed as a nightclub-owning Van Helsing stand-in for Vampire in Brooklyn. 13. Craven’s only other venture into classical horror iconography, 2005’s werewolf film Cursed, would also be met with critical and commercial disdain. 14. John Kenneth Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 55. 15. Perhaps the same race that Murphy’s character, Maximillian, references in the opening narration to Vampire in Brooklyn, which refers to vampires as being originally North

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African, before splitting into two factions, one going to the Carpathians and (presumably) establishing the classical vampire archetype, whilst his own faction settled in the Bermuda Triangle. 16. Dr. Green, working at the Brooklyn Museum, can also lay claim to having been the first “vampire in Brooklyn.” 17. “Mr. Marshall, a serious actor who also played Shakespearean roles including Othello, was best known as Blacula, an African prince bitten by Dracula.” In “Obituary; William Marshall, 78, Actor in Movies and on Broadway,” The New York Times (Section C, 10, June 21, 2003). 18. Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 54. 19. See: Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Phillips, 1788). 20. Means Coleman, Horror Noire, 180. 21. As he tells two pimps in the sequel, Scream Blacula Scream, “You’ve made a slave of your sister. You’re still slaves, imitating your slave masters!” 22. Although he’s hardly so idealistic in other regards—his first victims in the modern day are a pair of stereotypically flamboyantly homosexual furniture dealers, one Black, one white. 23. Compare this to the character of Louis (Brad Pitt) in Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 2004), who is torn apart with guilt for turning a young girl into an immortal— but not, tellingly, saddled with guilt for being a slave-owner (or as his narration euphemistically puts it, “I was the owner of a large plantation,” which sounds more pleasant than “I was the owner of human beings”). 24. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin, 1981 edition, originally published 1859), 123. 25. Amusingly she is introduced complaining about her housecleaner prioritising her sick child over her duties as a servant. 26. Rather than keeping an eye out for the ships, Silas is watching the gameshow Family Feud, trying to guess the answers to the question “What might a playboy have that is made of silk?” Silas and Julius, aspirational, know the answers but live in squalor. 27. Vampire in Brooklyn was mostly shot in Los Angeles. 28. Erika D. Smith, “The Killing of Latasha Harlins was 30 Years Ago. Not Enough has Changed,” LA Times (March 17, 2021). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: http://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-17/latasha-harlins-memorialplayground-black-lives-matter-south-los-angeles. 29. Jim Newton, Andrea Ford, and Henry Weinstein, “Fuhrman Tapes Aired: A Recital of Racism, Wrath: Simpson Trial: Judge Ito Defers Decision on Allowing Jury to Hear Statements. Sound of Former LAPD Detective’s Words Reverberates far Beyond Courtroom,” LA Times (August 30, 1995). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: http://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-08-30-mn-40443-story.html. 30. Robert Lipstye, “Behind the Easy Smile, O. J. was Hard to Read,” New York Times (June 19, 1994). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: http://www.nytimes. com/1994/06/19/sports/behind-the-easy-smile-o-j-was-hard-to-read.html. 31. A plotline Murphy had already trod in his 1988 film for director John Landis, Coming to America, in which he had again worked with a filmmaker who had made his reputation with horror films, and again in which he would play multiple roles, including both Black and white characters. 32. In Blacula, Mamuwalde never kills or feeds off of a white woman. Even if he can break the taboos of murder, there are still some lines the film knows not to cross.

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33. In bombastic delivery, sharp dress sense, and slicked back hair, Pauly seems almost minutely modelled on activist Reverend Al Sharpton, even referenced in the script when Julius exclaims, “One minute you is you, the next you is Al Sharpton. Sharpton, a divisive figure in Black culture, agreed that the Simpson verdict had nothing to do with O. J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence, but about the place of a Black man in America, saying at Cochrane’s funeral eulogy ‘With all due respect to you, Brother Simpson, we didn’t clap when the acquittal of Simpson came for O. J. We were clapping for Johnnie. We were clapping because for decades our brothers, our cousins, our uncles had to stand in the well with no one to stand up for them.’” “A Friend at a Funeral” (April 7, 2005). Accessed December 13, 2022. Available from: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-friend-at-a-funeral/. 34. Interestingly both films also begin at a port, in which a coffin is removed from a boat, each coffin containing a member of the “undead”—the aristocrat Maximillian in Vampire in Brooklyn and the hapless victim of the Tonton Macoute in The Serpent and the Rainbow.

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part iv

Lineage and Legacies

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chapter

15

The Unlikely Urban Undertaking: Music of the Heart and its Curious Craven Consistencies Calum Waddell

A

cursory glance over Wes Craven’s filmography might indicate that his more family-audience-orientated1 Music of the Heart (1999) stands out as an unusual diversion in a plethora of acclaimed horror motion pictures. In addition, it is the only one of his films to be nominated for an Academy Award.2 Other elements, for instance its lack of gothic trappings, have resulted in the film being singled out as a notable exception from Craven’s more familiar horror templates by academic writers on the form.3 Nonetheless, the purpose of this chapter is to argue that Music of the Heart—which is based on a true story and a later documentary4—actually has thematic similarity to several other Craven projects, including even his blockbuster Scream (1996), which preceded its production and (for a short while) provided the filmmaker with an A-list brand. This argument will also use the text as a prism through which to note that the director, although not innocent of presenting a “white savior” narrative, at least indicated an occasional dedication to racial diversity throughout his catalogue of work—an aspect that was frequently lacking in the resume of some of Craven’s contemporaries. Finally, this chapter concludes that Music of the Heart should be reconsidered within wider concerns that have surfaced in the director’s most notable achievements, from as far back as his debut with The Last House on the Left (1972). Writing in 1985, for instance, Christopher Sharett, treating the director as an auteur figure, acknowledges “The equation of horror with pervasive social crisis—the chief characteristic of Craven’s films.”5 It is also this social crisis that is addressed and discussed in Music of the Heart. Perhaps the best way to begin this chapter is to clarify where Craven’s reputation stood in 1999. While the success of Scream gained him his biggest audience to date, his previous work was still the subject of considerable controversy. Writing about the filmmaker in 1992, for instance, Robert Shaye—the

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Figure 15.1  Based on a true story, Music of the Heart obtained an Academy Award nomination for its lead actress Meryl Streep

Chairman of New Line Cinema, which had produced A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—would state that Craven was a “problematic” director, adding “I had seen The Last House on the Left and was frankly appalled. It was beyond horrific. It was brutal.”6 Similarly, documenting the history of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in 1994, author Tom Dewe Matthews would unfavourably compare The Last House on the Left to The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) by castigating “the static dismemberment of women” in the former.7 As such, Craven’s critical reputation, even after Scream, was arguably not entirely redeemed—The Last House on the Left, for instance, would remain censored by the British Board of Film Classification until 2008.8 In addition, little effort was evident in reclaiming some of the director’s lesser-known work from the decade prior to Scream, including less commercially successful undertakings such as Deadly Friend (1986), Shocker (1989), and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), each of which had flopped at the box office. It may have been this lack of commercial success that resulted in Scream’s original theatrical posters announcing it as thriller rather than horror.9 c r av e n l e g a c i e s

After the success of Scream, similarly teen-orientated slasher-horror films, often with a self-referential tone, would begin to surface—notably I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), Urban Legend (Jamie Blanks,

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1998), and Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000). With these films less wellreceived than Scream, Craven found his original template mentioned as the instigator for a new slasher boom that, like the one of more than a decade before that began after Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham, 1980), did not necessarily value quality over quantity (both I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend would inspire quickly realized, badly-received sequels). Hence, as recently as 2007, Steffen Hantke would mention that the postmodern and reflexive Scream was “either the best thing or the worst thing to happen to the horror film”10—an opinion that has also been echoed by fan press writers such as Jim Harper.11 Music of the Heart should perhaps, first and foremost, be seen as an attempt by Craven to remove himself, however briefly, from a genre that was seen as aimed at teenagers.12 Certainly, one of the recurring elements of Craven’s work is its focus on youth: the two seventeen-year-old girls of The Last House on the Left, Mari (Sandra Cassel) and Phyllis (Lucy Grantham), the cannibal teenager of The Hills Have Eyes (Janus Blythe) and her mirror suburban opposite (Susan Lanier), Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Kristy Swanson’s abused schoolgirl Samantha in Deadly Friend, and the victims of Scream. Even in his latter-day work, such as Cursed (2003), My Soul to Take (2010), and Scream 4 (2011), the director found his way into, or had written (as is the case with My Soul to Take), projects that address the challenges of moving into adulthood and accepting loss (which Shocker [1989] also does an underrated job of highlighting). Characters in Craven’s work also frequently come to the realization that their (usually upper middle-class) parental unit is deeply flawed and/or discover that American society is centered around a deeply competitive survival-capitalism, mediated via struggles against monstrous creations such as Freddy Krueger. The latter aspect is also crudely expressed in The Last House on the Left via the Krug Stillo gang, but it is even present in Courtney Cox’s iconic Gale Weathers character in Scream, and in the juxtaposition of Otherness within The Hills Have Eyes and The People Under the Stairs (1991)—antagonists who indicate paranoid libertarian values that has led them down a terrifying road of moral corruption and neglect. In his famous hypothesis of “The American Nightmare,” Robin Wood notes that pivotal to the horror film of the late 1960s and early 1970s “is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression.”13 Wood goes on to praise Craven’s The Last House on the Left for channeling the Vietnam horrors of the period by way of its depiction of intergenerational destruction and corrupted identities and politics (and indeed identity politics): “My Lai was not an unfortunate occurrence out there; it was created within the American home,” he would claim, drawing on the notorious ethnic cleansing of a small hamlet in

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Vietnam by American troops.14 This concept of Craven’s early work existing alongside the period of war across the former Indochina has been further channeled by academics such as Adam Lowenstein,15 although the director possibly made his interest in the ramifications of this period most explicit by producing the made-for-television biopic Kent State (James Goldstone, 1981), indicating that he was passionate about not allowing the events of the May 4, 1970 shootings to fade into distant memory. Certainly, whereas Solanas and Getino argued that a Third Cinema, albeit one that surfaces in authoritarian societies inspired by Communist revolution (their famous manifesto even quotes from Mao Zedong, indicating a rather naïve, if even perhaps ignorant, romanticism of such regimes), was one such way to oppose Hollywood narratives, Wood—who had little time for canonically accepted “methods” of filmmaking—would hold Craven up as an equally radical, even revolutionary, voice in addressing America’s Cold War politics. Ultimately, Craven’s The Last House on the Left indicates how leftist provocation—with the clue being in the title of the film—could also be expressed via genre; something that many critics and scholars still struggle to accept. One can of course only ponder the lasting effects that being an aspiring academic during the Vietnam War had on the filmmaker, especially given the debates and protests across campuses, but Craven’s apparent disdain for his own generation and the Reagan-Bush period of American politics, beginning most explicitly with A Nightmare on Elm Street (complete with the title’s reference to Kennedy) but running through the bad parenthood of Deadly Friend, The People Under the Stairs, and even Scream, is difficult to ignore. While Craven was not and has not been considered a revolutionary filmmaker, at least in the stripes of a Godard or Maldoror, his horror work does at least discuss the need for “good” liberal youth to stand up against a conservative, regressive adulthood, in order for American society to avoid Othering impoverishment and poverty (and in some cases gender and race).16 Indeed, without wishing to sound hyperbolic, the director’s cinema is a cinema that frequently proposes the need for political and social change (if not revolution, albeit a theme certainly hinted at in The Last House on the Left but only explicitly touched upon in The Serpent and the Rainbow [1987]). While this concept is perhaps most fluently expressed in the lies that are hidden from the youth of A Nightmare on Elm Street, it is also evident in the world that Meryl Streep’s Roberta Guaspari exists within during Music of the Heart—with her well-meaning attempts to interest urban and disenfranchised children in playing the violin. From this basis, Guaspari sees potential for the children to find a voice, and entertainment, removed from such “bad” options as the gang violence of East Harlem. Streep’s character does have previous form among Craven’s work. While, as established, teenagers are the focal point of the director’s best-known motion pictures, more mature and “lived-in” characters—albeit in their early-to-midthirties—had also driven the narrative to earlier efforts that include Swamp

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Thing (1982), The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). Streep was fifty years old at the time of Music of the Heart but she is, importantly, established as a character undertaking a “second life” in the film—when we are introduced to her, she is tearing up a photograph of her ex-husband, but she is also careful to retain her own image, as her two young sons play and shout in the background. Her mother tells Roberta that she is “a beautiful talented woman,” hinting at the more youthful figure that is also displayed over Music of the Heart’s opening credits, in pictures from her past and eventual (failed) marriage. Most telling, however, is that Roberta’s first appearance in the film is concurrent with her shouting at removal men who are mishandling her precious violins as she packs to leave an unnamed, unlocated suburbia for New York in 1981. In this brief moment the character indicates a willingness to stand up to men and shows clear authority and dignity—something that the single mother Marge Thompson (Ronee Blakeley) has failed to retain after her own divorce in A Nightmare on Elm Street, instead turning to alcoholism. Blakeley’s Marge Thompson is one of a number of notable single parents in Craven’s work: Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is another, alongside Beatrice Straight in his made-for-television film Chiller (1985), the abusive Harry Pringle (Richard Marcus) in Deadly Friend, and Hank Loomis (briefly portrayed by C. W. Morgan) in Scream. What these characters all have in common is that they make or have made decisions (even as seemingly minimal as Langenkamp’s rejection of further horror film roles in the meta-themed Wes Craven’s New Nightmare) which set off a series of events that begin to unravel the idealistic “suburban” nuclear family/parental unit. In contrast, by moving Roberta from the suburbs to the city, Music of the Heart subtly establishes a “reversal” of sorts within the Craven oeuvre—the character we are to be most invested in, within the narrative will, in contrast to the director’s most comparable figures, find her voice and stability away from the recurring suburban-nightmare trope. Tearing up the image of her “previous” life is an early metaphor for the journey to come. We may even, perhaps, see her return to New York as a wish-fulfilment within Craven himself, who famously began his film career in the city before moving to Los Angeles (his feelings on the Hollywood machine are perhaps best expressed in the aforementioned Wes Craven’s New Nightmare). However, lest this comment indicate that Roberta’s journey is free from anxiety, it should be noted that Craven is careful to flag the clear and evident differences and dangers between suburb and city. One child in seventh grade is caught stealing a Stanley knife from art class, another is the victim of a drive-by shooting. This concept of the city as “unsafe,” despite carrying unavoidable racial elements in Music of the Heart (which will be discussed), also offers audiences a Craven lineage that goes back to The Last House on

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the Left, where the film’s two teenagers are caught off-guard and captured while visiting an urban location. Craven also used New York as a location of danger and “social decay” in his less well-remembered Vampire in Brooklyn. Lowenstein, noting the likes of The Last House on the Left and A Nightmare on Elm Street, discusses how “horror was embedded in ideas of community that provided the films with a cultural and political urgency.”17 Peeling back the proverbial upper-middle class wallpaper of conservative but “stable” suburbia and exposing the potential for savagery (The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, The People Under the Stairs) and failed families has certainly been a recurring and often provocative aspect of Craven’s genre output.18 Typically, once the suburban “dreamscapes” are shattered, the characters fail to repair them. The additional challenge for Roberta, then, is to retain and support the family unit during her experience of living in East Harlem and to impress her new boss Janet (played by Angela Bassett), hostile staff, and a group of generally disinterested students. As such, this confrontation—both adjusting to the destruction of the suburban ideal and dealing with unfamiliar cityscapes—is not foreign to the Craven thematic. m e l o d r a m at i c m u s i c

Music of the Heart can be broadly described as a melodrama. The film follows a restorative three-act structure and is a throwback to the “classic” Hollywood style of cinema.19 For example, Roberta begins the film underconfident and uncertain about the difficult road ahead as an unemployed single mother. In Act Two she finds her “calling” as a violin teacher at an inner-city New York school, where most of the pupils are ethnic minorities and whose families live on the poverty line. Local parents, and some staff, are deeply skeptical about their children learning to play the instrument. Of course, Roberta wins almost everyone over, while continuing to navigate her love life (her sons even submit a dating advert in her name). In the final act, Roberta’s violin program is curtailed by funding cuts, but she plays a widely successful benefit concert at the Carnegie Hall—supported by many famous contemporaries—which allows for the school to continue with its violin tutorials. If, according to Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, “the most common sort of intertextual motivation is generic,”20 then Music of the Heart can be identified as a thematic relative to other Craven films—similar perhaps to identifying the “John Carpenter” themes that connect non-horror projects such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Starman (1984) to Halloween (1978) or The Fog (1980). As such, it is not necessarily genre that provides the link here; rather it is the director’s own superlative ability to initiate his familiar concerns within an

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Figure 15.2  Meryl Streep plays enthusiastic violin teacher and hard-working single mother Roberta Guaspari in Music of the Heart

accessible melodramatic framework. While Carpenter or another contemporary such as David Cronenberg may have their body of work considered as an “auteur” whole, there is little note of Music of the Heart within writing on Craven’s more famous teen-horror undertakings. As established, in Music of the Heart, Roberta’s struggle is to find stable employment and raise her two children—which she does with some encouragement and support from her former high school love interest Brian (Aidan Quinn). However, he leaves Roberta to work in Texas for three months (“What did you think, we were going to get married in the morning?” he tells her, as she shows evident disappointment about his departure following their lovemaking). Hence, even early in Music of the Heart, Craven indicates that the replacement of a stable mother-father-children unit, once broken, is not easy to repair. Later in Music of the Heart, Roberta’s mother will warn her against “making the same mistake again” when Brian returns to New York, re-introducing the character’s rush to find the “accepted” stability of husband-wife once more. In the end, however, her lover explains that he is opposed to marriage—urging Roberta to just keep “having a great time” (in return, she decides to conclude the relationship and is chastised by her young sons for leaving them fatherless). Craven’s pessimism about “the family,” the source of horror in so many of his projects, also maintains Music of the Heart as a film with thematic consistency to his past—ultimately, Roberta must succeed during the early years of Reagan’s America alone and driven solely by her own independent will. Curiously, however, it is here where Music of the Heart might be seen

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to become more conservative (with a small “c”) than the director’s previous efforts: by the power of her own ambition and confidence, Roberta succeeds. Unlike the broken homes of A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream, Craven’s interest in Streep’s redemption—her gamble to move from “white” suburbia to the more “dangerous” East Harlem, from the glamorous to “the ghetto,” is repaid. Yet, even in spite of Music of the Heart being based on a true story, one must question how much of this is down to Roberta’s own white privilege? To Craven’s credit he does acknowledge the racial friction that is in the film (and presumably the original true story). In an exchange with a Black mother, Roberta is told: “My son’s got more important things to learn than dead white man’s music.” She is then asked the question, to which she is shown to be unable to offer a direct and relevant answer, “How many Black classical composers can you name? How many Black classical violinists do you know?” Finally she is informed “You white women think you can come up here and rescue our children who don’t want rescued in the first place— no thank you.” In this moment of important conflict, Craven seems to anticipate the criticism that might come from his making Music of the Heart. His response to this, effectively casting Streep as a hard-done-by do-gooder, is hardy worthy of Fanon or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (one is reminded of the latter’s comment “Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-determination in relation to others”21—which, well-meaning or not, Streep’s character achieves in the end). With this said, Craven is careful regarding some of his character’s next steps: even perhaps acknowledging the so-called “Magic Negro” character that Matthew W. Hughey has defined so well, and which was especially prevalent in concurrent 90s cinema such as The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994), The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 1999), and The Green Mile (Frank Darabont, 1999). r ac e a n d p l ac e

Speaking about “new” cinematic racism in American film, Hughey mentions how “new racism reinforces the meaning of white people as moral and pure characters while also delineating how powerful, divine, and/or magic-wielding black characters may interact with whites and the mainstream. In so doing, these on-screen interactions afford white people centrality, while marginalizing those seemingly progressive black characters.”22 Aside from the teacher-pupil relationships of Music of the Heart, the key race-relationship in the narrative is that between Roberta and her boss Janet. The depiction of white privilege that Craven presents when the two first meet is unmistakable: Roberta has her

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two young children perform violin in front of her, and their “cuteness” and skill seems to impress Janet. Additionally, despite having no teaching qualifications, Streep’s character is listed as a substitute option for the school when she reveals she can supply fifty free violins for the students. However, Craven does not necessarily initiate this scene in order to prioritize white privilege— indeed it is, if anything, only affirmed further when Roberta is faced with the argument of the aforementioned Black mother. Angela Bassett, who even more than Eddie Murphy arguably carries the core narrative challenges of Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn,23 may also be seen to avoid becoming a “magic-wielding black character.” She is revealed to be a mirror-image, of sorts, to Roberta— driven, organised, resilient. Although she gives Streep opportunity in the early part of the film, she is also not responsible for sustaining her employment or her violin programme, and she does not elevate or lead Roberta to any sort of blissful marriage or even capital-success. Instead, the more troublesome narrative arc that Craven is guilty of in Music of the Heart is—as mentioned—that of cultural privilege. The “world” of Roberta is explicitly white and middle-class, but shown as worthy of dominance in the Black urban environment. Furthermore, whereas Streep is at least offered two male acquaintances in answer to her narrative singleness, and a morning-after scene with one, Bassett is not. Even at the concluding concert she is pictured not with a date, but with Gloria Estefan’s teacher Isabel Vasquez. We do learn that Janet is married (“My husband begs me to stay out of the kitchen,” she comments24) but she remains, as per Hughey and his repeated characteristics of the “assimilated” Black character, “friendly” and “desexualized.”25 Bassett would certainly have benefited from a more dominant role in Music of the Heart (and even a less asexual portrayal)—although she does get some tough lines and gets to enthusiastically introduce the major concert that Roberta instigates at the film’s end, attesting to her centrality in the story. She is very much a supporting role but not one, it can be argued, that is defined or characterized by race—were it not East Harlem, one imagines Janet could just as easily be white, itself a problem with the Music of the Heart screenplay. To address this aspect further, it may be worth at least noting some of the diversity that Craven’s previous work has engaged with and the director’s general use of Black characters. Robin R. Means Coleman argues of horror suburbs during the 1980s, including “Elm Street,” that “these streets were not accessible to just any old member of the public. Implicitly, no Blacks (or any racial minorities for that matter) were allowed.”26 However, while only based on an original story and screenplay by Craven, a heroic Black character (Kincaid, played by Ken Sagoes) actually survives A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), and reappears—and is killed, along with the other returning cast—in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988). In Coleman’s defence, Sagoes appears in the documentary Horror Noire (Xavier

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Burgin, 2019), based on her book, where the author also states on-camera that Black characters during this time were almost always a supporting act. Craven is also dubbed to be more progressive than his contemporaries. Regardless, the fact Sagoes is still so well-remembered attests to the (later) Elm Street universe as being more racially complex than the original comment suggests. Furthermore, it is doubtful Craven’s original would work as well as it does with added diversity, given it is an astute critique of white suburban ignorance, privilege, and paranoia. Lawrence Fishburne’s psychiatric nurse Max Daniels also survives A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, while Toy Newkirk as Sheila Kopecky is another Black character in the fourth film. In addition, one of the final girls of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989) is Kelly Jo Minter’s Yvonne Miller (Black actress Minter would later appear in The People Under the Stairs). Craven’s involvement in these sequels is minimalto-non-existent, but highlighting such instances will hopefully challenge the idea that the “nightmare” world the filmmaker instigated in 1984 was one that subsequently followed a path of exclusively white characters and white lives. Similarly, Coleman references the Black characters and/or themes of Craven’s Swamp Thing (1982), The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs, and Vampire in Brooklyn, and not always favorably (The Serpent and the Rainbow is said to treat “Black religion as powerful and savage”27), but his The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985), which features two Black characters, is absent. This is not to indicate that The Hills Have Eyes Part II is any kind of underrated racerelations masterpiece, but rather to draw attention to the fact that, during the 1980s, Craven was at least interested in having Black characters within his cinematic universe, albeit as support to white heroes and heroines, anticipating the casting of Bassett in a strangely non-racial role in Music of the Heart. Regardless of how flawed some of these depictions are (and Coleman raises some valid points in her discussion of The Serpent and the Rainbow), the same diversity is not present in the work of David Cronenberg, Tobe Hooper, Sam Raimi, and several other genre figures during this decade.28 Interestingly, then, Coleman establishes The People Under the Stairs and Vampire in Brooklyn as “a Blacks in horror film effort” and a “Black horror film,” respectively.29 An indication, perhaps, regardless of the thematic criticism, that Craven at least attempted to address race and racial conflict during a period when American (and Canadian) horror cinema was, in general, less representative of ethnic minorities. That this representation was often clumsy, and based on screenplays by white figures, is—it goes without saying—acknowledged. Indeed, this point is not to diminish the fact that Craven’s Black characters continue to raise discussion: The Serpent and the Rainbow and its exotic voodoo-horror, his creation of an “Elm Street” deemed to be specifically white in the original Freddy-nightmare, and, as per Coleman, his establishing of “Black Brooklyn” in Vampire in Brooklyn as “a dreadful place [. . .] filthy, covered in

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graffiti and littered with trash. It is a slum in which gambling (numbers running) and Italian-led gangland murders are not uncommon.”30 One might even see a similar depiction of East Harlem in Music of the Heart, with Streep’s white musician portrayed as an “answer” to the potential life of crime awaiting the (largely minority) children that she is intending to teach the violin to or Janet’s politeness and beauty as the counterpoint to the “tough” street kids and their parents. Nonetheless, it would also be unwise to argue that Craven depicts his Black characters negatively in Music of the Heart. The unconvinced parents of East Harlem are offered a voice and Roberta is seen as being of suburban lineage—blissfully unaware of the very real urban challenges that minorities face in such a major American city. While this aspect of Music of the Heart needs more clarity and depth, particularly the answer/presentation of what could be read as a form of cultural-colonialism (“dead white man’s music”)—Craven’s “white savior” narrative does address the proverbial—and in this case suitably allegorical—white elephant in the room. Ultimately, one might even argue that the director’s foremost interest, across his body of work, is in how class formations have perverted human interaction in contemporary America, including those of race, perhaps the reason Robin Wood had chosen The Last House on the Left as the foremost text for his Marxist perspective on the American nightmare. Prior to the brutally effective opening of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), in which the audience undertakes the perspective of a Black character in a hostile white suburban environment, Craven arguably

Figure 15.3  Angela Bassett plays Janet Williams, an overworked school principal, in Music of the Heart

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attempted a similar presentation of racial tension with his prologue to Scream 2 (1997). Although not as powerful as that presented by Peele, the introduction to Scream 2, which features two Black characters being stalked and stabbed in a packed cinema of masked (mainly white) attendees, does not (much like our introduction to Get Out) need to clarify race to be about race. The unfamiliarity of seeing a major horror-franchise film, as late as 1997, begin with two Black perspectives, in an environment that emphasizes their minority status (white staff, white actress on-screen), is enough in itself to present conflict, danger, and violence. Cornel West states, “Hence, for liberals, black people are to be ‘included’ and ‘integrated’ into ‘our’ society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be ‘well behaved’ and ‘worthy of our acceptance’ by ‘our’ way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.”31 The Craven of Scream 2—in which a Black woman stabbed and killed “in real life” is played out alongside an audience too distracted by the murder of a white woman on the cinema screen to care/notice (subtly but aptly emphasizing the difference in “acceptance”32)—is the same director who made Music of the Heart. While it is, therefore, tempting to accept that Music of the Heart has Roberta “win” a victory for “well behaved” Black and Hispanic children and their families—especially as they take to the Carnegie Hall stage with her—one could as well argue that just as the filmmaker presented “nightmares,” one should perhaps allow his late-day sentiments to be those of “dreams.”33 Possibly a reason why the Roberta-Janet friendship does not allow race to intervene. Reviewing Music of the Heart, Roger Ebert would affirm that Craven “is in fact a cultured man who broke into movies doing horror and got stuck in the genre; he’s been trying to fight his way free from studio typecasting for 20 years, and this movie shows that he can get Meryl Streep to Carnegie Hall just as easily as a phantom to the opera.”34 Despite Ebert’s clear disregard of genre in this comment, there is a truth—perhaps—that Craven finally, as he faced the last full decade of his life in the new millennium, simply wanted to bring together his hopes and fears for a “new” America. As such, Music of the Heart is guilty of naivety, and a wishful attempt to see a future without class (where the impoverished “working” man or woman might enjoy a night at the opera, so to speak), but not—this chapter concludes—of a more sinister underlying racism.

t h e f i na l n o t e

This chapter has argued that Music of the Heart is far from unique in the Craven filmography. Meryl Streep’s Roberta is one of a number of strong women who,

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facing adversity including the loss of the family unit, overcomes considerable challenges and even a drastic change of location35 to find herself and her inner strength. Even the director’s contemplation of racial conflict in modern America, admittedly not as sophisticated as one might hope and more in the tradition of similarly themed Hollywood works such as Dangerous Minds (John N. Smith, 1995), is not exclusive to this melodrama. Finally, Craven has a recurring interest in how the suburb and the city alter or impact on the behaviour of his characters— and, of all his work, perhaps this is most explicitly explored in Music of the Heart. Undoubtedly, the director’s sole Oscar-nominated project is heavy on “schmaltz”—and idealizes the concept of white working-class achievement over a more-realised and considered Black urban existence—but it is also a motion picture that attempts to present a feel-good, positive, even alluring idea that communal coming-together might be the purest opposition to corporate interests. For the director who began his career with the unflinching realist-horror of The Last House on the Left, and whose focus on a youth movement constrained by parental and societal corruption birthed cinema’s greatest bogeyman in Freddy Krueger, we should—one is willing to concede—also welcome Music of the Heart as a distinctively Wes Craven film. It comes from a director whose concerns never changed with age, but whose outlook and perspective on humanity at least, if Music of the Heart is to be understood, finally became a little more optimistic.

notes   1. The film received a “PG” rating in the UK and the United States.   2. For Meryl Streep.   3. See Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 96.   4. Small Wonders (Allan Miller, 1995), also nominated for an Academy Award (for Best Documentary Feature).   5. Christopher Sharrett, “‘Fairy Tales for the Apocalypse’: Wes Craven and the Horror Film,” in Literature/Film Quarterly (Vol. 13, No. 3, 1985, Salisbury University), 139.   6. In William Schoell and James Spencer, The Nightmare Never Ends: The Official History of Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films (New York, NY: Citadel Press, Carol Publishing Group, 1992), ix.   7. Tom Dewe Matthews, Censored (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 240.   8. See: Beverley Price, “Banned in the UK: The Last House on the Left,” (London Horror Society). Accessed December 14, 2022. Available from: http://www.londonhorrorsociety. co.uk/banned-in-the-uk-the-last-house-on-the-left/.   9. “Hedging their bets, posters for the film announced Scream as a ‘new thriller’ from Craven,” affirms J. A. Kerswell. In Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Film Uncut (London: New Holland Publishers, 2010), 171. 10. Steffen Hantke, “Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety,” in College Literature (Vol. 34, No. 4, 2007, The John Hopkins University Press), 191.

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11. States Jim Harper: “For better or for worse, Wes Craven’s Scream is the film that made teen orientated horror a viable commercial project once more,” in Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies (Manchester: Headpress, 2004), 151. 12. Richard Nowell, for example, credits Craven’s Scream for resurrecting “the moribund teen slasher film.” In Merchants of Menace:: The Business of Horror Cinema (New York, NY and London: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014), 149. 13. Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 75. 14. Ibid., 128. 15. See Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representations (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 111–44. 16. I note here that The Last House on the Left complicates this notion, given that Krug and company are presented as a forgotten class that has fallen into drugs and murder, something that Craven does not romanticize. However, the film begins with Mari, introduced as a hippy, challenging the suburban conservatism of her parents, who, in the end, are just as likely to “go to war” to avenge their daughter’s cruel death as the Vietnamese fighting against the American presence in Southeast Asia. In this presentation, Craven appears to argue that savagery is a heartbeat from everyday lives in America: a metaphor perhaps for the “living room war” of Vietnam. 17. Adam Lowenstein, “Alone on Elm Street,” Film Quarterly (Vol. 64, No. 1, Fall 2010), 18. 18. I also want to note Craven’s interest and early involvement in adapting Virginia Andrews’s disturbing novel Flowers in the Attic to the cinema screen—in the end the film was overseen by Jeffrey Bloom and released in 1987. See: Brian Collins, “Collins’ Crypt: FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC—A Wes Craven Film?,” Birthdeathmovies.com. Accessed December 14, 2022. Available from: https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/11/12/collins-crypt-flowers-inthe-attic-a-wes-craven-film. 19. For the definitive discussion of what constitutes “classic” Hollywood storytelling and style, see: David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1985). 20. Ibid., 19. 21. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (New York: James Currey: 2005), 16. 22. Matthew W. Hughey, “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films,” in Social Problems (Vol. 56, No. 3, 2009), 544. 23. Of all the major horror directors, I would argue that Craven’s work is almost always female-centred. The Serpent and the Rainbow is a notable exception, but Music of the Heart, as established in this chapter, finds the director working with many similar themes and one of these is undoubtedly strong, individual, and driven female characters. 24. The film is remarkably heteronormative whereas, interestingly, a concurrent comparable Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) is not. Craven did, however, introduce a gay character, and homoerotic subplot, into his work with Cursed in 2005. 25. Hughey, “Cinethetic Racism”, 545. 26. Means Coleman, Horror Noire, 148. It should also be noted that Coleman incorrectly labels Krueger a “paedophile:” in the film he is described solely as a “child murderer.” 27. Ibid., 8. 28. In contrast, George Romero, also highlighted by Coleman, has a better record than most in this regard. 29. Means Coleman, 2011, 8. 30. Ibid., 180. 31. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1993 [2001]), 6.

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32. Craven concludes this sequence with the Black victim (played by Jada Pinkett Smith) crawling to the front of the screen in order to be noticed. The spectators, realising the scene of “real” murder in front of them, then unmask—revealing their white faces. It is an unmistakable metaphor for Black suffering and marginalism (including even in horror cinema and the “white” world of Scream—and one wonders if Craven was himself being self-depreciating here given the cast of the sequel), and one of the greatest sequences he ever directed. 33. In fairness to Craven, his “happy ending” to The People Under the Stairs was also critiqued by some of his horror audience—Balun, for instance, would write “the film limps to a feel-good finale that’s guaranteed to make your teeth ache.” Such comments indicate how horror fans may have become accustomed to a more pessimistic narrative arc from the director—although his desire to provide more warmth was, at least occasionally, still clearly in evidence. Chas Balun, More Gore Score (Key West, FL: Fantasma Books, 1992), 60. 34. “Music of the Heart,” Roger Ebert.com. Accessed December 14, 2022. Available from: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/music-of-the-heart-1999. 35. Even at this late chapter stage, it is also worth noting Deadly Blessing (1981) here.

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chapter

16

“Blessed Be America for Letting us Dominate and Pray the Lord Our Soul to Keep.” Wes Craven’s Legacy in The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy Erika Tiburcio Moreno

I

n order to remember Wes Craven as the radical horror director that he was, we must first acknowledge the genre itself as one that can be subversive and provoke audiences with uncomfortable, nightmarish realities—perhaps even a warning of things to come if society does not reconsider its present. Craven stated that his movies were “a source of a public nightmare, [. . .] reflect[ed] something that is already there.”1 As a result, The Last House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), My Soul to Take (2010), and his film tetralogy Scream (1996–2011) confronted aspects of racism, class struggle, and middle-class suburban privilege and hypocrisy through violent and oftentimes raw images. From his debut, Craven broke social conventions by distorting the American Dream, which held that the nation would provide equal opportunities to achieve success. Since the Founding Fathers of the United States, American philosophy has focused on understanding human determination and individual effort as the main forces required to prosper.2 Consequently, this philosophy placed responsibility solely on citizens’ decisions, which “served as a powerful vehicle for blaming those who did not succeed.”3 Social injustice and class struggle permeated several of Craven’s film stories. His criticism of the hegemonic ideology also complicated the naturalization of the dichotomy between normalcy and monstrosity. Social hierarchy was rooted in middle-class values (higher education, religious beliefs, private property, rationalism, and laws), which led to protection of the status quo and the exclusion of those individuals who deviated from it. Nevertheless, the Collingwoods (The Last House on the Left), the Robesons (The People under the Stairs, 1991), and Springwood’s neighbors (A Nightmare on Elm Street) violate the rules that uphold their position in order to protect themselves and even their suburban groupings from immediate menaces (killing their daughter’s

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Figure 16.1  Films such as The Purge franchise could be seen to owe their lineage to the likes of Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972)

killers, cleansing society from working Black people, and murdering a child stalker, respectively). In acting rashly, however, they make the future even more dangerous for new generations, and their often criminal acts come back to haunt them. Thus, Wes Craven exposes the establishment’s hypocrisy; these characters despise criminals for their cruel acts and their inability to adapt to social rules but, in the end, they all turn to violence as a (perhaps short-term) solution. If the “New World” was built on violence, so too is the land that Craven would craft his many nightmares upon. Craven’s critical gaze on classism, hypocrisy, and the regulation of violence has also influenced recent filmmakers, whose works stemmed from the financial crisis of 2008 and the unprecedented increasing gap between lower and higher social groups in the United States.4 This influence is clearly perceptible in James DeMonaco’s works The Purge (2013) and The Purge: Anarchy (2014), in which the ruling class takes advantage of social levers and the legalization of crime for twelve hours each year to perpetuate its hegemony through the figures of the Founding Fathers, coupled with social control. Additionally, religion (expressed through the prayers pronounced by those who are to be purified—in The Last House on The Left, Mari prays to purify herself after being raped, while Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street prays as a ritual to protect herself from contact with the antagonist), law, and morality (purification is explained through the elimination of those individuals who are not useful) also serve as tools of domination over a majority of the population, who are depicted as objects of enjoyment and exchange. Consequently, the performances that alienate the popular classes and transform them into dangerous Otherness within the American capitalist system become positive attributes when applied to seemingly respectable citizens.

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This chapter will explore the main features of Wes Craven’s criticism of the bourgeoise’s pretense of virtue and his legacy on recent works, and will thus be divided into two parts. The first section will focus on the thematic features in his work that question the purity of the bourgeoisie, whose borders of distinction between “us” and “them” then blur when violence becomes a mechanism of revenge. The second section will focus on how The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy update the social commentary found in Wes Craven’s works and present the perpetuation of bourgeois hegemony through the legal and moral justification of purging the country of undesirables and the underprivileged. t h e m o n s t r o u s b o u rg e o i s i e a n d t h e c l e a n s i n g o f h u m a n s c u m : w e s c r av e n ’ s h o r r o r g a z e

The Last House on the Left launched Wes Craven’s career in the horror genre, converging with the trends that proliferated from the late 1960s. In that period, horror was mainly based on real social fractures blurring the borders between normalcy and monstrosity. The Nixon administration (1969–74) continued with the unsuccessful Vietnam War, which ended—for America at least—in 1975 (although The Paris Peace Accords concluded combat operations two years earlier), initiated relations with Mao’s China providing a new source of cheap imports, and implemented emerging materialist measures that were later expanded under the neoliberal presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–9). The impoverishment of the lower middle-class resulted in a swelling of the ranks of the working-class.5 Amid this context, Craven’s first work criticizes the idealized self-image of the bourgeoisie through the mirroring of classless criminals with wellrespected citizens’ cruelty: a technique that pervades the whole story of his shocking debut. For instance, in the first part of The Last House on the Left, the Collingwoods and Stillos are introduced following the same pattern: an external description, their house, the shower, and the subsequent conversation. While the former characters are portrayed as a well-dressed couple living in a neat bourgeois house, full of modern art and bookshelves, Craven juxtaposes the Stillos as disheveled and living in a chaotic apartment full of rubbish all over the floor. Apart from that, third-party depictions reinforce their role as good or evil characters. While the Collingwoods’ daughter, Mari, is linked to innocence and “the prettiest piece,” a radio broadcast portrays the Stillos as authentic, heartless villains: “fugitives,” “convicted murderers,” “dope pushers and rapists,” “animal-like woman,” “extremely dangerous,” “reputed to have hooked his own son on heroin,” and “child molesting, peeping Tom-ism.” This excess of unthinkable horror makes them the “Other.”

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Division between the two figures is also established through the distinctive traits of each class.6 Craven configures the middle-class as dominant and the “ideal” hegemonic model to impose socially. Cultivation through gentle conversations, clothing style, and refined home decoration coexist with religious symbols (the Collingwood family possesses a Bible and Mari prays “Now I lay me down to sleep,” but the Stillos reject the proverbial “Good Book”) and cultured language (when Mari uses “tits” her father says that he feels this is a “sound like back in the barracks [of World War 2],” initiating also his service to country), which detach them symbolically from the “forgotten” class. Another important sign of class differentiation is the type of neighborhood each family lives in, associating a large luxury detached house in the suburbs with the Collingwoods and a small unkempt apartment in New York with the Stillos. Such differences also operate under the capitalist requirements of production and consumerism based on “a social world which judges people by their capacity for consumption, their ‘standard of living’, their life-style, as much as by their capacity for production.”7 In this way, whereas the Collingwoods are linked to ideal citizenship rooted in their power to maintain the system (Mr. Collingwood is a doctor), the Stillos are a destructive force, long rejected and now entertained solely by their own out-of-control barbarity, which destabilizes social bounds through violence and vices.8 Yet amongst them is at least one “good hearted” and reluctant figure—Junior (Marc Scheffler) —whose own situation is one of being “left behind” to a criminal family unit.9 Exclusion is thus another procedure to organize classes into a hierarchy based on capitalist domination.10 The dinner scene with Mari’s parents reveals the inability of the antagonists to behave like the bourgeoisie, and the subsequent conversation between the Stillos and the Collingwoods about the opulent family’s squandering exposes the former’s impotence. Their coarseness and the brutal acts that they had committed facilitate the quick association between them and monstrosity: Craven perhaps insinuating that a rejected class is a dangerous one. Nevertheless, the gang’s feelings of guilt after Krug rapes Mari complicates their supposed dehumanization in later comparison to the cold-blooded revenge by the Collingwoods and the decision to apply their own justice instead of turning to the same legality that favors their social position. Aggression, one might say, contradicts class breeding by showing its cross-cutting tendency. Historically, violence has permeated American culture based on the overriding need to apply it to a hostile and savage environment that had to be redeemed for the settler class.11 At the time of Craven’s first film, Americans were also left wondering how their own young could have perpetrated atrocities such as the My Lai Massacre. In The Last House on the Left, double-sided violence points out the hypocrisy of the hoarding bourgeois Collingwoods who scorn the Stillos for their brutality, yet set out a precise preparation of sadistic traps in their home in order to deploy torture techniques on the antagonists. In

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this regard, Adam Lowenstein points out that “Krug’s distrust of class privilege is confirmed later in the film when John Collingwood uses a piece of fine silverware as a weapon to trap and murder the Stillos.”12 Not only does The Last House on the Left delve into the potential for savagery even within affluent citizens, but A Nightmare on Elm Street also twists class opposition through conflicting characters. Unlike the former, bourgeois hypocrisy through violence against perpetrators is extended to a neighbors’ group under the Reagan administration (1981–9). During that decade, the President spread Christian conservative ideas that considered social ills to be the cause of immoral deviation, combined with the weak political administrations during the 1960s that led America into a doomed war in Vietnam.13 As a result, the focus on evil threats like serial killers in the media and violent films fueled the 1980s conservative discourse and subsequent moral panic.14 In the narrative to A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger embodies the dangerous working-class outsider who is burned by the affluent upper middle-class neighbors. Freddy’s status as a child murderer who is absolved from charges eventually motivates his neighbors to slaughter him because, for the first time, the system they trust has failed them. According to Nancy’s mother Marge, “We took gasoline, we poured it all around the place and made a trail of it out the door. Then lit the whole thing up and watched it burn. [. . .] I even took his knives.” Purging impurity through fire and eliminating danger become a reasonable motive to violate laws for the (all-white) families of Nancy’s suburb. Indeed, respectable positions in the community (Nancy’s father, Donald, is a lieutenant) enable the perpetrators to avoid legal consequences. Not only does false virtue operate as a mode to further protect white suburbia, but middle-class adults also feel entitled to detest lower-class individuals. The character of Rod (Nick Corri), set up as from bad parentage, and his imprisonment without clear evidence, reinforce class prejudices. His clear differentiation from Tina (Amanda Wyss), Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), and Glen (Johnny Depp), especially by his rough mannerisms and class insecurity, places him as an accurate suspect for Freddy’s murder of his girlfriend. Noticeably, labelling him as “a musician type” is used by a police officer to present his criminal records (arrests for drugs, brawling), reinforcing the local law’s hypothesis about the offender. The officer’s authority position also qualifies him to define Rod using subjective terms like “a lunatic delinquent” as scientific truths. Criticism of the Reagan morality is also pointed out through broken families and neglecting parents: Nancy’s parents are divorced, her mother is alcoholic, and her father ignores her constantly; Tina’s mother travels with her boyfriend without worrying about her insomniac daughter; and Glen’s bourgeois parents are unable to understand Nancy’s sorrow after she loses her friends. Indeed, wrongdoing by the parents in killing Freddy also serves as the explanation for the teenage deaths, which turns the antagonist into “a kind of monstrous

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doppelganger for the parents who killed him. After all, he is (like those parents) a murderous adult.”15 Class impunity for the unpunished, cold-blooded crime is also reinforced by Nancy’s support for her parents’ offence. Again, bourgeois violence is characterized by rationality as seen in Nancy’s home preparation as a mortal trap for Freddy, not unlike the traps set for Krug and his gang in The Last House on the Left. As Freddy’s realm is the dream world, she brings him crashing back to reality and turns to aggression in order to defeat him through different violent methods. Noticeably, her decision to burn him like in the past establishes a link with the adults’ resolution and perpetuates the purge of undesirable monsters. However, it is only when Nancy finally rejects this cycle of violence that she is shown to truly defeat Freddy (despite a tagged-on “nightmare” ending, which Craven long expressed disdain for). Indeed, the director’s message at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street seems to be one of hope for the generation behind him. Notwithstanding the pop culture success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The People Under the Stairs is perhaps the most striking film of Craven’s that explores class struggle and the consequences of white privilege (and even supremacy) in modern America. The same year that the movie was released (1991), America was experiencing an economic recession, which was especially acute in Los Angeles, the movie’s setting.16 There, gentrification and race inequality fueled the social unrest engendered by the immense gap between affluent whites and less fortunate African-Americans that ushered in riots in 1992.17 Unlike the aforementioned films from the director, this time normality and monstrosity are represented by the working-class and the middle-class, respectively. The Robesons are a white middle-class couple of incestuous siblings obsessed with accumulating power and wealth, a compulsion that ends up driving them insane. It is the economic control over the have-nots that triggers the encounter between the protagonists, who are deprived of the necessary resources to meet expenses, and the monstrous landlords. As the character (and storyteller) Grandpa Booker affirms in the film, they ascended the social ladder because they benefited from exploiting impoverished people: “tail-end of the craziest family you ever heard of, every generation more insane than the one before it. Started out as a family running a funeral home, selling cheap coffins for expensive prices. Then they got their fingers into real estate, started making a lot of money taking over people’s homes. The more money they got, the greedier they got. The greedier they got, the crazier they got.” This scene of dialogue points out the perversity of the capitalist system under Bush-Reagan by showing an unkempt room with worn-out furniture while Grandpa Booker and his grandchildren are talking about the prosperous Robesons. Indeed, that situation is what forces the protagonist, Poindexter Fool, to live in a small flat in a ghetto and turn to delinquency to pay for his

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mother’s operation and the monthly rent. Thus, the myth that democracy in America “freed themselves from elite control and a class-divided society,”18 is twisted with the two evil, greedy characters that explain delinquency by moral deviance. Their consideration as superior citizens who live in a detached Victorian-era house in a well-respected neighborhood allows them to maintain their status and hide their terrible crimes. In spite of being accused several times of kidnapping the ghetto children, they deceive police officers by showing well-educated manners and offering coffee and sugar in a luxury living room. Class status favors impunity for their crimes in terms of economic, physical, and symbolic domination. Not only does tyranny stem from increasing rents, but they also turn kidnapped poor children into rejected commodities: those who did not fit the requirement for being the perfect boy (“do not see, or hear, or speak evil”) were dismembered and confined to cannibalism in their cellar. Furthermore, religion is presented as a method to impose bourgeois hegemony. The house is full of symbols and, as in other Wes Craven movies, the prayer “now I lay me down to sleep” is repeated by Mr. and Mrs. Robeson in a recording. Thus, religion impregnates their morality through prayers, corporeal punishment, and symbols, despite being “child abusers who are twisted by a repressive religious upbringing.”19 Having established some of the key themes in some of the director’s most interesting work, and positing him as an auteur of special worth, this chapter now argues that The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy by James DeMonaco continue Wes Craven’s legacy by continuing to question American discourse as well as focusing on class struggle as a trigger for horror. Thus, violence in American culture impregnates all social strata, subverting class distinction and imposing a capitalist system where elites maintain supremacy through false

Figure 16.2  The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) led to a franchise and a television adaptation (pictured is actor Rhys Wakefield)

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respectability. As a result, religious, legal, and ethical tools represent the elites’ attempts to disguise their own hypocrisy. violent hegemony, religious hypocrisy, and c l a s s wa r fa r e : w e s c r av e n a n d t h e p u r g e

The Purge in 2013 and The Purge: Anarchy in 2014,20 from director James DeMonaco are sociopolitical action-horror movies in which all crimes are legal for a twelve-hour night each year on March 21. The official goal is to reduce criminality rates and release violent inclinations (the “repressed,” famously commented on by Robin Wood regarding Craven’s early texts) by purging them, but, according to the filmmaker, what lurks behind is “an economic reason [why] they’re doing it. [. . .] The people who can’t protect themselves on that night, the poor people, the sick, the poor . . ., so those are the ones being killed, they’re being sacrificed. So that they ultimately were unburdening the economy by killing the non-contributing members of society [. . .] there’s a whole race class thing occurring in this time.”21 Social inequality, capitalist engulfment of the have-nots, and elite impunity and dominion are common in both filmmakers’ work. Similar to Wes Craven’s works, bourgeois antagonism is constructed on the basis of class hatred and the use of violence as a mechanism for perpetuating its hegemony. Furthermore, that dichotomy is attached to the specific historical context as mentioned in The People Under The Stairs. For DeMonaco’s work, his titles responded to the consequences of the 2007–8 financial crisis and the failed Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Social class tension increased and protests emerged in cities like New York in 2011, showing people’s discontent with the establishment.22 Similar to Craven’s movies, the impunity system that favors bourgeoisie superiority triggers aggression justified by upper-class morality. Not unlike The Last House on the Left, both movies begin with a prologue that simulates realism to enhance viewer credibility. While in The Last House it is clearly stated (with possible threadbare acknowledgement of the Manson murders) “the events you are about to see are true,” in DeMonaco’s films a similar appeal to verisimilitude is supplied with fictional data and numbers in an attempt to convince audiences of “real” government research (and responsibility). After the introductory data, the two texts point out that the purge is the key to understanding the decrease in crime and unemployment. Albeit in different ways, both texts conclude by praising the purge and the New Founding Fathers. The following sequences question that affirmation through the scenes positioned from different protagonists, who will finally refuse to turn to aggression. Before brutal aggressions, these working-class characters (the Sarding grew rich selling alarm systems for the Purge night),

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as well as OWS protesters, decide not to purge and rebel against the rules dictated by those in power.23 Conversely, peers release enraged violence and engage in a ferocious struggle, claiming that purging is their right conceded by the New Founding Fathers as the only option to respond to an unfair class divide. In The Purge: Anarchy, ordinary citizens show themselves with threatening attitudes, armed, and even some masked, either to empower themselves against those who can also eliminate them, to rebel against the governmental oppression, or to profit from the capture of those found. Although the films present a wild and ruthless atmosphere where civilizational constraints are eliminated for that twelve-hour night, law enforces compliance with strict rules: “Weapons of Class 4 and lower have been authorized for use during the Purge. All other weapons are restricted. Government officials of ranking 10 have been granted immunity from the Purge and shall not be harmed.” This lawless territory provides immunity for crimes as well as instilling insecurity in those who are inferior, where non-mediated violence and survival are the only bounds between individuals. The uncivilized, regulated Purge by the government revisits one of the main ideas in The Hills Have Eyes; that is, “classes that have remained downtrodden for so long while the middle class has grown rich. These are the forces in America which will someday claim what they lack and foster a class revolution because of societal inequities.”24 Thus, the increasing impoverishment and a potential revolution against the powers that be trigger the elite’s reaction by enacting the annual event as well as the superior sense of entitlement to purge the undesirables. This belief is expressed by the blonde, well-educated young boy at Sandin’s home when trying to capture the man hiding in their house: Your home tells me you’re good folks, just like us . . . the man you’re sheltering is nothing but a dirty, homeless pig. A grotesque menace to our just society, who had the audacity to fight back, killing one of us when we attempted to execute him tonight. The pig doesn’t know his place, and now he needs to be taught a lesson. You need to return him to us. Alive. So that we may Purge as we are entitled. Alongside the shattered normality of the “protected” suburbia (now a very real threat to life), monstrosity—and even Otherness—is portrayed as a homogeneous group whose bourgeois class consciousness justifies and perpetuates the annual purge. In The Purge, the Sandins and their neighbors are portrayed as well-educated, middle-aged, and sophisticatedly dressed couples who live in an isolated, wealthy neighborhood protected by fences. Additionally, the wealthy young girls and boys who are hunting the African-American man are presented as well-dressed and wearing masks of their own faces as a symbol of their power of impunity. This group and Sandin’s neighbors, the Halversons, the Ferrins, and Mr. Cali, share their willingness to protect privilege through

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risk-free aggression. In the second part, the upper-class continues being formed by well-dressed and well-educated individuals who engage safely in the Purge. Nevertheless, as Eva, one of the protagonists, affirms, wealthy people do not take risks to purge, and instead “buy poor and sick people, and they take ’em in their homes and they kill them where they’re safe.” Accessing protection is an important status leveler that guarantees survival. Fences, home security systems, and technology serve to maintain class manners as well as to create physical and symbolic barriers between the “civilized” establishment and the “barbarian” remainder. The Purge: Anarchy further initiates this idea when the protagonists are captured and auctioned in order to become prey. During the event, the female presenter speaks politely while describing the deadly weapons. Additionally, fortification of houses from external dangers illustrates the significance of private property to sustain bourgeois hegemony. Similarly, Craven also pointed out the preeminence of protection and private property as a means to separate the affluent from the less fortunate, and to maintain their purity “behind closed doors.” While The People under the Stairs and A Nightmare on Elm Street focused on fortified houses with metal bars to protect from external dangers, in The Last House on the Left, Scream, and A Nightmare on Elm Street again, the Collingwoods, Sidney, and Nancy prepared (or seized their knowledge of) homes to defeat the intruders (and the same can be said of lesser Craven works such as Deadly Friend [1986]). In the first three examples from Craven’s oeuvre, the characters’ safeguarding operates as a refuge to deploy retributive, visceral violence unseen, while their class respectability reinforces legal immunity and prevents suspicion from authorities. Thus, consumerism and security in The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy allow elites to deploy power over the subordinate strata and demonstrate a shared social standing. Furthermore, both filmmakers point out the inner hypocritical relationship between the sense of superior bourgeois civilized morality and the centrality of violence in American culture as a means to favor higher classes. Purging, cleansing, and eliminating undesirable individuals or groups to maintain social stability (Freddy Krueger, the Stillos, the African-American poor, the noncontributor, the strong trio of women in Deadly Blessing [1981]) is the common justification that initiates further cycles of violence that prove to be outside of anyone’s control. However, what is a shared unpunished punitive action over the lower classes in Wes Craven’s movies becomes governmentally legislated by them in DeMonaco’s works. Sharing the same perspective, this new vision of false virtue is influenced by the crisis of recent times and the idea that the establishment rules to maintain the status quo instead of ensuring the welfare of citizens. Indeed, the inefficacy of police officers in the former and the impunity in the latter reflect the same trends that have pervaded American horror cinema since the 1970s and the Watergate scandal.25 Since then, corrupt, inept, or invisible authorities have been icons in many horror movies. For Craven

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and DeMonaco, authorities are presented as the enablers of class repression through illegal acts or as militant branches of the government. In The Purge: Anarchy, one of the government officials explains to the protagonist that: There’s an unwritten purge rule, sergeant. Don’t save lives. Tonight, we take lives. We make things manageable for us. Unfortunately, the citizens aren’t killing enough. So we supplement it all to keep things balanced. It’s important work the NFFA does and we can’t have any interference. We can’t have heroes . . . oh no sir . . . no heroes. I hope you feel cleansed. Blessed be America, a nation reborn. Noticeably, the prayer establishes another connection with Craven’s discourse about bourgeoisie and religion. As established, Christianity provides the middle-class with justification to inflict violence on those who are considered “impure” (prayer is heard before the instigation of the parents’ vengeance in The Last House on the Left). In The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy, the upper class pronounce the same prayer “Blessed be the New Founding Fathers for letting us purge and cleanse our souls. Blessed be America, a nation reborn” before killing. Religious rituals legitimate violence and connect with American nationalism rooted in the puritan crusade between civilizing savagery and diabolic chaos.26 Thus, violence responds to a higher purpose; to be good Americans and better citizens. Instead, criminal despair by the have-nots is condemned and punished by the individuals who promote the Purge night. Religious ceremonies, technology, and security are the three elements that construct higher class monstrosity, a class whose sophisticated brutality through grand guignol-esque spectacles reveals the power that they exert over society.27 The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy focus on class warfare and aggression to encapsulate social tensions that pervaded the first decade of the twenty-first century and the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Like in the best Wes Craven films, American culture is portrayed as an unequal society which also sustains an unequal relationship with violence—for Craven, the “American Nightmare” was always lingering in the fringes of the suburbs and white privilege; in the Purge films the worst offenders are those with access to the finest firearms who are now able to ignore the country’s notoriously flimsy controls on such weapons. t h e c l a s s s t ru g g l e g o e s o n a n d o n : w e s c r av e n a n d ja m e s d e m o n a c o h o r r o r f i l m a s sociopolitical texts

Turbulent times, social unrest, and inequality are three elements that the horror genre has explored in different titles. Wes Craven was one of those directors who delved into the socio-historical roots that placed the elite and the

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Figure 16.3  The blatant use of political imagery (the White House is here shown in The First Purge [Gerard McMurray, 2018]) is a recurring facet of The Purge franchise.

bourgeoisie as the hegemonic groups which imposed their interests. Through his movies, he called into question their supposed exemplarity by exposing the same inclination to violence as outcasts. However, these affluent people deployed power through several instruments in order to impose their order throughout society. Education, religion, status, and role-model citizenship favored their impunity to violate their own rules. The People Under the Stairs and A Nightmare on Elm Street reveal the inherent hypocrisy behind pointing out the dangerousness of ghetto inhabitants, Freddy Krueger and committing crimes in the name of goodness, and authentic Christianity. Historically, the variations in the portrayal of middle-class monstrosity respond to the specific change that American society went through. Thus, it could be said that Wes Craven offered a critical gaze of his time’s problems but also identified the structure that still permeated culture. James DeMonaco, in The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy, also studies social unrest and criticizes elite impunity when governing, and the twisted effect that savage capitalism has on society. In his case, the Purge night establishes class distinction in purging, allowing elites to deploy performances of violence as a method to distinguish their sophisticated aggression from the lower class’s raw aggression. He also coincides with Wes Craven in highlighting Christianity and technology as instruments to ensure physical and symbolic separation from the savage crowds. Security stemmed from moral justification and barriers triggered an unequal confrontation which enabled the bourgeoisie to impose their order and to engage in a ritualized aggression that perpetuated their social position. Finally, it must be stated that Wes Craven’s legacy in horror will continue to pervade social commentary. His works and his gaze are still essential to understand social inequalities in America and to criticize impunity in a world where social differences are increasingly acute.

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notes   1. Wes Craven, “Wes Craven on Violence and Horror On-screen,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross (September 11, 1980). Accessed December 14, 2022. Available from: https://freshairarchive. org/index.php/segments/wes-craven-violence-and-horror-screen.   2. Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Dream: A Cultural History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 10.   3. Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 101.   4. The unseen inequality gap captured the social attention and caused social protests in 2011. See Carrie Wofford, “‘Inequality for All’ is Killing the Economy,’” U.S. News (September 27 2017). Accessed December 14, 2022. Available from: https://www.usnews.com/ opinion/blogs/carrie-wofford/2013/09/27/robert-reichs-inequality-for-all-explains-ourmajor-economic-problems.   5. David Simmons, American Horror Fiction and Class: From Poe to Twilight (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 121.   6. Adam Lowenstein, “Only a Movie,” Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 143.   7. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 311.   8. Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. Expanded and Revised Edition, edited by Robin Wood (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003), 66–7.   9. Tellingly, perhaps, Craven allows the character to survive in the 2009 remake. 10. Eric Olin Wright, Understanding Class (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2015), 8. 11. John G. Cawelti, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 212. 12. Lowenstein, “Only a Movie,” 134. 13. David A. Horowitz and Peter N. Carroll, On the Edge: The United States in the Twentieth Century (Belmont: Thompson/Wadsworth, 2005), 236. 14. Philip Jenkins, A History of the United States (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), Chapter 6, Perlego. 15. Jay Daniel Thompson and Erin Reardon, ‘‘‘Mommy Killed Him’: Gender, Family, and History in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984),” M/C Journal 20 (No. 5, 2017). 16. Jenkins, A History of the United States, Chapter 6. 17. Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, Paul M. Ong, Andre Comandon, William A. Darity and Darrick Hamilton, “Fifty Years After the Kerner Commission Report: Place, Housing, and Racial Wealth Inequality in Los Angeles,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences (Vol. 4, No. 6, 2018), 163. 18. Gregory C. Leavitt, Class Conflict: The Pursuit and History of American Justice (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017), Chapter 1, Perlego. 19. John K. Muir, Wes Craven: The Art of Horror (Jefferson, MO and London: McFarland & Company, 1998), 169. 20. After these two parts, James DeMonaco directed The Purge: Election Year (2016) and scripted The First Purge (2018) and The Forever Purge (2021). Besides, the TV series is a prequel of the Purge universe. 21. James DeMonaco, “The Purge Interview—- James DeMonaco (2013)—Ethan Hawke Thriller HD,” YouTube (July 6, 2013). Accessed December 14, 2022. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5RFw95GfAo&t=162s.

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22. Leavitt, Class Conflict, Chapter 9. 23. Kendall R. Phillips, A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st Century Popular Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 33. 24. Muir, Wes Craven, 69. 25. Jeffrey A. Weinstock, “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Burlington, VT and Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 284. 26. Cawelti, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture, 214. 27. A. Bowdoin Van Riper, “All Against All: Dystopia, Dark Forces, and Hobbesian Anarchy in the Purge Films,” in Dark Forces at Work: Essays on Social Dynamics and Cinematic Horrors, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (London: Lexington Books, 2020), 122.

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chapter

17

“How Meta Can You Get?” Scream 4 and Wes Craven’s Final Nightmares Calum Waddell

W

es Craven’s Scream series has been viewed as a form of postmodernism or even so-called “hyperpostmodernism.”1 It should, however, be noted that “postmodern horror” was discussed before the release of the film: Isabel Pinedo, for instance, (somewhat inevitably) drawing on Jameson, would note how “Humor frequently involves self-reflexive references to other horror films” in her discussion of franchise entries such as Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (Tom McLoughlin, 1986) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Bruce Pittman, 1987).2 This acknowledgement of earlier genre productions that also involved characters discussing elements of common horror frameworks should not distract from what made and makes Scream unique. Whereas in previous “postmodern” examples, the narrative personalities may show their pop culture awareness (“I’ve seen enough horror films to know this means trouble” states someone being stalked by Jason in Friday the 13th Part VI shortly before her impalement), Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson had Scream subvert the expectations of characters, genre, and audience. Hence, premarital sex does not result in death, one of the killers (instead of the potential victims) says “I’ll be right back,” there is more than one “final girl,” and the teenagers of the suburbia where the slaughter takes place band together and watch old horror movies instead of splitting up (which also does them no good but attests to a wider, general acceptance of a doomed generation). Even the concept of copycat antagonists across sequels, although not without some precedence,3 is unique within a slasher template that favors the reappearance and repetition of key villains (Chucky, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Norman Bates et al.). Certainly, the influence of the Scream franchise is undoubted; Adam Rockoff speaking of the original 1996 film notes how it “broke all the rules, shattered box office records and once again made the slasher film viable.”4 Perhaps Craven’s

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Figure 17.1  Scream (1996) saw Craven reinvent the horror film for a new generation (pictured is actress Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker)

most famous achievement, and certainly his most lucrative, it was probably no surprise to anyone that Scream inspired a quicky turned-around sequel (in 1997) and a “concluding” chapter in 2000. Unfortunately, the director’s later work, specifically his final three projects—Red Eye (2005), My Soul to Take (2010), and Scream 4 (2011)—have not received the academic or critical attention that one might wish for, especially when compared to his earlier texts. For instance, after writing about his 1996 blockbuster in an article following his passing, Caetlin Benson-Allott states “In the years after Scream, Wes Craven’s films became ever more highly produced and more involved with the Hollywood system. They did not all exhibit the vitalism of his early films.”5 But is this judgement fair? This chapter answers that question with a focus on Scream 4 (release title: Scre4m) and argues that the themes and ideas of Craven’s concluding effort bring his career to an exemplary conclusion, even laying out the groundwork for the franchise to continue (which it would with a new follow-up, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, premiering in 2022, and a Scream VI in 2023), but acknowledging a future genre landscape that would itself need to adapt to distribution, generational, and production challenges. Whereas Valerie Wee has been critical of the director’s final bow, writing of Scream 4 that it “reverses the revolutionary and transformative trajectory of the earlier entries in favor of a more conservative and regressive resolution,”6 including the re-centering of the now-familiar (Sidney Prescott) as survivor and victor against younger characters, this chapter maintains that the film is actually more challenging and provocative than this statement might indicate. In making a case for the value of the third sequel, however, reference will be made to the director’s wider work, including the two motion pictures that he directed prior to this belated return to his hit property. It will also be

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stressed that Craven’s final decade as a director addresses some potent questions of his own legacy and “fatherhood” within the genre. Before continuing, one thing that should perhaps be stressed is that prior to becoming the figurehead of Scream, Craven had a difficult relationship with sustaining his various franchise projects, but not necessarily from a lack of trying. As such, one might reasonably consider that Scream was—despite his lack of a writing credit—the most important mythology of all his credits. Kerekes and Slater mention how the director hoped to turn his debut, The Last House on the Left, into a series with an initial sequel that would bring “Krug and Weasel coming back from hell.”7 Although the writers do not offer a citation for this story idea, the director did produce a remake of The Last House on the Left in 2009, directed by Dennis Iliadis and shot in South Africa. This undertaking provides broader evidence of Craven’s own postmodern sense of Self—the original 1972 shocker had, of course, been a contemporary re-imagining of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), while the remake’s Cape Town location (occasionally offering a surprisingly convincing double for the United States,8 although anyone familiar with Cape Town will not fail to notice its mountainous visage hovering over the backdrop of the Last House remake) means that each film of this very loose trilogy is based across different places and times. As such, what we might loosely dub the “Bergman” trio can still—quite curiously—be replaced and reimagined within a theoretical recurring reinterpretation of classic European mythology and themes of shared trauma (in the South African Last House, both antagonist and protagonist are white, for instance). In addition, just as he had brought Bergman’s ideas to the Vietnam War generation, the filmmaker had seen his seminal achievement used as inspiration for a number of similarly cheap transnational endeavors, including in Canada (Death Weekend/The House by the Lake [William Fruet, 1976]) and Italy (most famously with Night Train Murders [L’ultimo treno della note, Aldo Lado, 1975] and House on the Edge of the Park [La casa sperduta nel parco, Ruggero Deodato, 1980]). These successors to Craven’s film are not without their own admirers. Writing about House on the Edge of the Park, for instance, Stephen Guariento states, “a rather confused but riveting sadoerotic variant on the Last House on the Left [. . .] a mesmerizing, nerve-wrackingly claustrophobic example of Italian sleaze cinema at its best.”9 Given that in two cases the Italian films even borrowed the same star for a similar serial-rapist/killer role (David Hess—who appears in House on the Edge of the Park and Hitch-Hike [Autostop rosso sangue, Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1977]), perhaps it was awareness of the (admittedly minor) success of these productions that encouraged the director to expand his own Last House on the Left universe in 2009. Similarly, in 2006 Craven would attempt to breathe new life into The Hills Have Eyes (1977), with an update overseen by French director Alexandre Aja. This successful rehash would, in turn, be quickly followed by a fresh sequel:

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The Hills Have Eyes 2 (Martin Weisz, 2007), which underperformed at the box office and concluded the storyline.10 In this case, these attempts to revitalize old material might have been due to the negative critical response to The Hills Have Eyes Part II in 1984, of which at least one critic commented: “It’s hard to believe that Craven himself could be responsible for this truly awful sequel to his classic.”11 The filmmaker’s occasional involvement with the franchise spawned by the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) led to story and screenwriting credits for the third film in 1987, and the creation of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994. This sixth sequel depicts Craven, playing himself, trying to take back control of the characters and storyline that he had initiated a decade prior, doubtlessly indicating his frustration with the previous direction of the franchise. According to actor Robert Englund, Craven also tried to get a prequel made as well: “‘I want to do it . . . I think Wes spoke with Heather [Langenkamp] about it.’”12 However, Scream was an altogether different proposition and scenario. Aside from its enormous global audience popularity, and the subsequent reinvigoration of the so-called “slasher” genre, the producer of the franchise, Bob Weinstein, claimed it was always developed to be a trilogy.13 Furthermore, Craven would have directorial control over an ongoing multi-film narrative for the first time in his career, as well as access to the production values that had escaped him on the likes of The Hills Have Eyes Part II. a l l a b o u t t h e fa m i ly

Craven’s Scream series is based around (white) suburban family trauma, not dissimilar from the world that he introduces in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The killers in the first three films are all connected to the tragedy that befell Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), when her mother had an affair with the father of her high school friend (and later lover) Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich). The sexual liaison causes the Loomis family to collapse and Billy’s mother to leave town (although she is revealed to be one of the two killers in Scream 2), sending the teenager and his friend Stu (Matthew Lillard) into a killing spree—slaughtering those closest to Sidney before targeting her directly. For Scream 3, the first of the series not to be penned by Kevin Williamson, there is only one murderer— revealed to be the hitherto unmentioned brother of Prescott. While the “reveal” of Scream 3 stretched logic far enough to have Craven himself parody it in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), the sudden introduction of unmentioned relatives as part of a slasher franchise’s “conclusion” is not unknown. Leatherface has a Vietnam veteran brother in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), and two of his victims from the previous outing are also revealed to have a vengeful sibling;14 Freddy Krueger is provided

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Figure 17.2  Prior to Scream, Craven had dabbled with postmodern elements in his classic Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), starring Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger (pictured)

with a daughter in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991); and Jason Voorhees gains a sister in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Adam Marcus, 1993). Thus, by reducing the conclusion of Scream 3 to familiar genre “canon,” Craven and his new writer Ehren Kruger may have been acknowledging that any addition to the format, no matter how reflexive or satirical, is doomed by the creative confines of what the slasher template demands, especially as more sequels are requested by the market. For this reason, it is not unsurprising that the Scream universe was abandoned for a further decade. With Scream 4, Craven continued to turn his own involvement in horror cinema back onto himself—a process that also defines Red Eye and My Soul to Take. The beginning of Scream 4 features two examples of “fake starts,” where characters that we believe are in the “real” film are in fact placed in the fictional Stab universe of the previous two sequels. Wee notes how the third sequel “attempts to integrate” the older characters “who are now struggling with adult issues related to work, marriage, and family—into what they see as the unfamiliar world of Gen Z, a world characterized by new relationships to new media and new communications technologies. In so doing, the film thematizes the conflicts that structure this generation gap, long before they escalate into violence and death. These interactions highlight the distance between teenage Jill and her friends and the adults around them.”15 Jill (played by Emma Roberts) is Sidney’s cousin in Scream 4 and, after being exposed as one of the two murderers, reveals her motive to be related to internet fame and the desire to “take over” the celebrity that Campbell’s character has enjoyed (including her fictional representation in the Stab movies). As one character intones, “One generation’s tragedy is another’s joke.” Nonetheless, it would be wrong to argue that a generational

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divide prohibits the older characters from also finding their own sense of place— not only does the returning Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) begin to adapt to citizen-journalism, using new “communication-technologies” in place of the printed page that had made her a best-selling author, but Sidney seeks a fresher course in recent horror from a high school film club. As such, these characters must “adapt” to a changing media environment, and also question that familiar Craven focus, the suburban homestead, as Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) struggles to resist the temptation to sleep with his flirtatious colleague Deputy Hicks (Marley Shelton), as the frustration of married life and monogamy begins to take hold. The film returns to this theme of the “new,” and its allure and temptation, whether technological or physical, throughout—but not necessarily, as per Wee’s argument, to establish that the conservative “old” order must regain the narrative for itself. Certainly, older references for a (presumably) “more mature” audience are present. For instance, during the prologue, as part of Stab 7, a character kills another and, when asked why, replies “because you talk too much.” This line and scenario are taken from Sleepaway Camp II (Michael A. Simpson, 1988)—a sequel that is seen as one of the precursors to Scream insofar as having the various victims reference their own interactions with other horror film mythologies.16 Moreover, a rooftop chase sequence in Scream 4 mirrors that (including aesthetically) of Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight Little, 1988), which itself attempted to reboot a franchise by replacing the “old” previous heroine (Jamie Lee Curtis) with a (by then) “new” younger alternative (played by Ellie Cornell). When Sidney states to her cousin, Jill, “you remind me of me,” Craven could be seen to utilize such stylistic homages, as in the example to Halloween IV, in order to remind his audience that the genre has repeatedly downplayed such aspects as retaining its female leads when a younger (and cheaper) option is available. Indeed, it is worth remembering that Heather Langenkamp would have to sit out all A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels except the two that Craven had a hand in. That Campbell’s character, however, maintains herself as the focus of all four Scream films—and with such a figure absent from the mythologies Craven had previously instigated but lost or sacrificed directorial control over (The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street)—the director is doubtlessly making a point about how (perceived) “lowbrow” or “carny” horror structures do not necessarily need to remain as such. Instead of retaining a dated figure, representative of the 90s, then, Campbell instead might be seen to finally transcend the same abject boundaries of ageing that the genre had resisted.17 Given Craven was now just four years from his passing, the actress also manifests a greater sense of how difficult it is to accept “passing the guard,” particularly when the latest generation is more interested in social media likes, memes, and, especially relevant to the critique of torture porn, nonchalant about both “reel” and “real” horror.

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As such, Scream 4 is interested in what comes next. The opening, for the first time in the series, dismisses the current trend in horror cinema: remakes and also “Japanese ghost girls”—both of which would include the director’s own filmography (he had been attached to direct a remake of Kairo [Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001], but settled for a co-writer credit on the eventual Pulse [Jim Sonzero, 2006]). Other characters berate “torture porn” such as Saw (James Wan, 2004) and its sequels.18 Throughout the film, the idea of obtaining celebrity status from “uploading” material online is referenced—as is capitalizing on tragedy for career or financial benefits (“Two girls. Butchered. Pay day” affirms one news reporter). Craven also seems to see an uncomfortable future for horror if it cannot respond to a generation whose more sinister entertainment comes from watching genuine death on its computer screens, easily accessible, especially when creators of alternative “fictions” are content to merely recycle the past or have, literally, lost the plot (we are told the Stab series has even veered into time-travel). Film buff Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) is asked by the inevitable telephone-stalker to name the remake of an older “groundbreaking” template towards the conclusion of Scream 4—which she responds to with a host of titles, including minor examples of the fad (such as Prom Night [Nelson McCormick, 2008] and When a Stranger Calls [Simon West, 2006]). When Reed is finally stabbed, she is told “It doesn’t happen as fast it does in the movies,” a concluding but important piece of dialogue because it indicates Craven’s own desire to stress the morality that the genre can and could impart, not least of all the traumatic experience of violence. Scream 4 associates this violence with a quite prophetic warning about the dark web, where atrocities can be streamed, resulting in fame—for perpetrator and “star.” It is a remarkably despondent film when turning its gaze onto the teenagers of a new decade. But how does fictional horror respond to the immediate access of the Internet? The question becomes especially relevant to Scream 4 when “old” media (DVD), during a “Stab-a-thon” event, clashes with “new” media (live streaming online from the killer: “this time he’s making the movie” we are told).19 Craven, having disparaged his own business interests (remakes, Japanese ghost stories reimagined for America), could also be seen to be having a conversation with himself: does the genre even have a cinematic future, beyond re-treading its past or becoming “just” a shortform internet viral phenomenon?20 With the opening to Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2022), the new directors appear to suggest an answer, based on what Craven has left unanswered. The film begins with a conversation between new character Tara (Jenny Ortega) and Ghostface, with the former saying, in the inevitable introductory phone call, that she likes “elevated horror”—which is “scary but with complex emotional thematic underpinnings” and references The Babadook (Jennifer Kent 2014). The joke is present so that Scream is placed “outside” the elevated horror pantheon—if not in the “schlocky

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cheese-ball nonsense with wall to wall jump scares” that Tara says she dislikes. Yet, writing about elevated horror (or what he describes as post-horror), David Church mentions that the films (which include The Babadook) “evince minimalism over maximalism, largely eschewing jump scares, frenetic editing, and energetic and/or handheld cinematography in favor of cold and distanced shot framing, longer-than-average shot durations, slow camera movements, and stately narrative pacing.”21 While Craven did not make cinema that could be dubbed “minimalistic”— even The Last House on the Left is heavily indebted to verité methods—it would be wrong to presume that, as with Scream 4’s opening disdain for the dilution of the genre with inferior regurgitation of older hit films, he was thematically distanced from what might be seen as “elevated horror.” Church is not incorrect to state that “meta-horror films” such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Scream “use heavily allusive intertextuality as ‘smartly’ and comedically play with the genre’s more generic cliches, post-horror films often seem less blatantly indebted to popular horror cinema for direct inspiration—hence the fact that they are often described as looking and feeling more like character-driven dramas.”22 However, it is not necessarily true, even when applied to some of the films Church comments on, that there are no clear and even “blatant” inspirations—David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) feels inspired by David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) owes a direct lineage to John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), and Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) is clearly influenced by The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). This debt to “popular horror cinema” is, as Craven argues in Scream 4, and seen in a pair of false-prologues that initiate a thin-on-ideas Stab 7, probably unavoidable, not least of all because the Internet has made everyone an expert (Kirby herself is known at high school for her vast knowledge of the genre) and everything accessible. Thus, if Scream 4 cannot be “new,” nor can we assume that “elevated horror” is the fresh alternative to another sequel, or the less “schlocky” equivalent to another teenagers-in-peril story. Moreover, just as the 2022 Scream then returns to familiar family-themes, as Tara is reunited with a sister and a past that she has rejected, giving audiences “emotional thematic underpinnings” after all, so too might Craven have been seen to be the forefather of “taking” from highbrow material and transitioning it into “lowbrow” genre entertainment. Bergman with The Last House on the Left is the most obvious example, so much so that Robin Wood would remark, “The Virgin Spring is Art; Last House is Exploitation. One must return to that dichotomy because the difference between the two films in terms of the relationship set up between audience and action is inevitably bound up with it [. . .] As media for communication, both Art and Exploitation have their limitations, defined in both cases, though in very different ways, by their inscriptions within the class system.”23 The Scream of 2022 cleverly hints at this division—Tara, in her

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Figure 17.3  Actor David Arquette returned for the fourth sequel, simply titled Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2022), the first to be made without Craven

impressive upper-middle class suburban home, wants her taste in film to reflect her identity, yet as the dialogue exchange indicates, setting-up the turbulent themes of family that lie ahead, what we assume to be “art,” rather than “just” genre or even “exploitation,” is a question that Craven wrestled with throughout his career. Hence, if the director had earlier drawn on Greek mythology and his own past for the purpose of “dissolving illusion and reality”24 in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and try to predict, albeit without answers, an alternative future for horror with Scream 4, so too would he revisit previous concerns in the two films he had made previously. f i na l f r i g h t s

As established, Craven may have expressed his own mortality in Scream 4: inviting questions of what comes next for the horror film but stabilizing his own fictional world and denying his audience a “reboot” of material that he clearly felt required no drastic alterations (hence Neve Campbell’s survival). However, this may also be true of his other final films. Red Eye, a claustrophobic and glossy thriller, focuses on a hotel manager called Lisa (Rachel McAdams) who is accosted by Jackson, a handsome stranger (Cillian Murphy) in Miami Airport. He encourages her to drink some alcoholic beverages with him. Both are flying to Los Angeles but, once on the plane, Lisa is told that her dad is slated for assassination unless she can change the hotel room for the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security and his family. Jackson works as an assassin for a terrorist operation that is preparing attacks on major government officials. In the early stages of Red Eye—which was released less than four years after 9/11, drawing on contemporary fears about air transport25—

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Lisa is knocked unconscious by Jackson during the flight, harassed into making phone calls from the air, throttled in the toilet, and verbally assaulted. Despite her tears, all passengers and staff decide not to react or to question, only a small girl (who trips up Jackson when he is leaving the plane) sees that something is amiss: Craven’s clear faith in a newer, better generation (even anticipating #MeToo). The dialogue consistently reminds the audience of Jackson’s (perceived) privilege: “Whatever female driven emotion-based dilemma you are dealing with, you have my sympathy,” he tells Lisa, adding, “Let me break this down into a little male driven fact-based logic.” When he asks if she has any questions about why she has to change hotel rooms for the politician and the situation her father is in, she says, “What good have they done me so far?” Jackson responds, “Best question you have asked all night.” Craven, directing from a script by Carl Ellsworth (also responsible for The Last House on the Left remake) reveals that Lisa is also a survivor—she carries the literal (and mental) scars of a rape. At the point of landing, when McAdams’s character stabs Jackson in the throat with a pen and runs from the airplane, passengers and staff assume only that Lisa is dangerous and must be apprehended. Red Eye is characterized by its claustrophobia, Hitchcockian concept,26 and Craven’s return to a familiar presentation of a lone, resourceful, tough heroine struggling to survive against a brutal male aggressor. However, strangely, when Jackson and Lisa do eventually reach the family home, it is the latter’s father (played by Brian Cox) who kills the terrorist and saves his daughter’s life. In this conclusion, and in one of his last projects, the director might finally be imagining himself as the auteur/“protector,” stepping into his usual surroundings of white suburbia to belatedly “kill” an especially toxic cinematic creation, a meta-verse concept that he previously teased in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. It is a jarring conclusion, denying Rachel her final vengeance, but offering the filmmaker his own “mirror image” of the idealized father.27 Craven’s final film as writer, My Soul to Take, was not well received, either critically or commercially, but it evokes many of the director’s concerns and even anticipates aspects of Scream 4. The aesthetic and thematic is as outrageous and surrealistic as what might be loosely dubbed to be the director’s less “groundedin-reality” work—see, for instance, the excess of Deadly Friend (1986), Shocker (1989), or The People Under the Stairs (1991) —and unfolds as a “greatest hits” collection. Opening with the Lord’s Prayer, also used in The Last House on the Left,28, we are introduced to a local serial-killer who—once gunned down and placed in an ambulance—is said by a female paramedic, whose family is from Haiti (a link to The Serpent and the Rainbow), to have multiple souls. Sixteen years later and the spirit of the deceased “Riverton Ripper” is stalking, killing, and possessing (shades of Shocker) seven children who were born on the day of his death. High school conflict, mainly between the popular students and the withdrawn and “troubled” Adam Hellerman, nick-named Bug (Max Thieriot),

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echoes Cursed (2005) and Scream, while the use of mirrors and dream-logic offers some link to A Nightmare on Elm Street. Even the hinted-at sexual tension between Bug and his abusive sister (Emily Mead), Craven’s literal indication of how perverted the Hellerman household has become after the lasting effects of the prologue-slaughter, is from The Fireworks Woman (1975) and The People Under the Stairs. In the end, Bug accepts that his possessed best friend, who he kills, can and will take the blame for the entire murder spree, which consequently allows for the urban legend of the Riverton Ripper to finally become buried—and, symbolically, release further generations from its fear (themes Craven explored with the ending to his original A Nightmare on Elm Street and then his return to directing the franchise in 1994). Bug, whose best friend would exclaim he was going to bring about a “revolution” (whatever this might be), instead learns that conforming to a lie, for the supposed greater good, is the more accessible option. Whether or not My Soul to Take was meant to be taken entirely seriously is anyone’s guess—the director pays homage to so much of his own work that it feels as if it the narrative is a warm-up for the even more dramatic “hyperpostmodernism” of Scream 4. The film begins and ends in the spacious family home, but reveals the crude, disjointed sexual tensions, aimless religious convictions (Bug’s sister encourages their mother to go to Church and “lie to yourselves again”), and almost mythic form of land entitlement and ownership—taken on the blood and flesh of an all-too-easily-dismissed past trauma—that have typified the traditional history of settler-affluence and “the good life” in the United States. The unique difference with My Soul to Take and other Craven narratives is that Bug, slated to be the hero, is finally its villain—by having the very real horrors of the “real” events transcend into a fiction, with the blame assigned to the wrong person, the characters, and their descendants, can now stop talking about—and organising commemorations and events around—the Riverton Ripper and his victims. The past is now just the past, and with “I pray the Lord my soul to take,” Christian “goodness” can continue to represent and speak for a perceived suburban purity. Kendall R. Phillips, writing about Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, noted how the director “is seeking to unsettle our common-sense boundaries between fiction and reality.”29 The author also notes how The low-budget brutality of Last House and Hills bear relatively little surface resemblance to the supernaturally fantastic Nightmare or Shocker, and, in turn, neither of these resembles the slick, self-referential parody of Scream or Cursed. This evolving style can be attributed, in part, to the filmmaker’s maturation and, in part, to the increasing financial resources backing his later films. But there is also a sense in which Craven’s style has proven more adaptable in relation to changing cultural tastes than either George Romero’s or John Carpenter’s.30

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Figure 17.4  The Ghostface figure, here pictured in Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2022), remains iconic

As established by this chapter, Craven never stopped abusing the thin line that separates our dreams from our nightmares and our realities from our deepest fears. He also remained prophetic in his last directorial efforts— for instance, Jackson and his own perceived white male privilege in Red Eye, an appearance and assumption that would later come tumbling down on Harvey Weinstein (whose brother had produced the four Scream films and Cursed), and the dark small-town past that stops the adults and the youth of My Soul to Take living a “normal” life, lest truth and consequence return, and a lingering family trauma—themes that, although not exactly “elevated” in the framework of Craven’s teen-slasher, are also touched upon in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). Finally, with Scream 4, the filmmaker would be brave enough to challenge the very nature of horror-as-franchise in its own right, ensuring his older characters would survive past the death of their own creator, but also provoking questions of how to reinvent a genre—seemingly played-out and tired—for future generations that might even reject the feature-length cinematic experience, and concepts of staged “horror,” in its own right. It is for such reasons as these that Craven’s concluding chapters offer a remarkable end to an important, influential, and unparalleled career in fear. notes   1. Writes Valerie Wee, “The Scream trilogy {Scream 2 [1997], Scream 3 [2000]) also marks a later phase of postmodernism . . . I have labeled this more advanced form of postmodernism ‘hyperpostmodernism.’” In “The Scream Trilogy, ‘Hyperpostmodernism,’ and the LateNineties Teen Slasher Film,” Journal of Film and Video (Vol. 57, No. 3, 2005), 44.   2. Isabel Pinedo, “Recreational Terror; Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.’ in Journal of Film and Video (Spring-Summer, Vol. 48, No.1, 1996), 28.

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  3. The obvious example is Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (Danny Steinmann, 1985), the fifth film in the series which, aside from in a dream prologue, does not feature Jason Voorhees as the killer but rather a paramedic whose son is killed in a local home for troubled teenagers. Jason “proper” would return in the next instalment. With this said, the original My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981) is itself based around a copycat-murderer.   4. Adam Rockoff, Going to Pieces (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2002), 177.   5. Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Wes Craven: Thinking Through Horror,” Film Quarterly (Vol. 69, No. 2, Winter, 2015), 76.   6. Valerie Wee, “Rebooting the Scream Franchise in the Digital Age,” In Nowell, R., Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 158.   7. David Kerekes and David Slater, See No Evil (Manchester: Critical Vision, 2001), 204.   8. Ironically, perhaps, The Last House on the Left seems to have been an inspiration for a previous and obscure South African-made variant, Savage Encounter (Bernard Buys, 1980).   9. Stephen Guariento, “Il Cinema Di Shock: The Films of Ruggero Deodato,” Samhain (No. 32, May/June 1992), 29. 10. Mind Ripper (Joe Gayton, 1995), which carries a producer credit for Craven and his son Jonathan, was released as The Hills Have Eyes III in Germany and has some thematic consistency (government nuclear experiments in the Mojave Desert creating a killer-mutant) with the previous two entries in the franchise. 11. James O’Neill, Terror on Tape: A Complete Guide to Over 2,000 Horror Movies on Video (New York, NY: Billboard Books, 1994), 175. 12. Englund told me this in an interview: “What Freddy Did Next,” Shivers (No. 113, 1994), 25. 13. Valerie Wee, “Rebooting the Scream Franchise in the Digital Age,” in Richard Nowell, Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 147. 14. There were other sequels after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, of course, but given that all the characters are dead at the end of the 1986 film, each that followed simply reintroduced Leatherface with a “new” family and began the story all over again from the ground-up. 15. Valerie Wee, “Rebooting the Scream Franchise in the Digital Age,”’ in Nowell, Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, 150. 16. “Long before Wes Craven’s masterful Scream (1996) turned the slice and dice trend on its head with its sense of pastiche and postmodern references, Sleepaway Camp II was nodding its noggin towards everything from A Nightmare on Elm Street to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with genre in-jokes galore,” states the hyperbolic UK Blu-ray sleeve for the film’s 2016 release from 88 Films. 17. Campbell was only thirty-seven when she starred in Scream 4 (and forty-eight when Scream 2022 was released), but it should be noted that the slasher film is, almost without exception, focused on youth. While some may mention Jamie Lee Curtis as an exception to this, it has to be stressed that by the time of Halloween H20 (Steve Miner, 1998) she had already established herself as an A-list actress outside of horror and, even in this case, for the next film, Halloween: Resurrection (Rick Rosenthal, 2002) she returns to the more traditional horror depiction of desexualised female “middle age” (and is then quickly killed). Curtis would eventually return again, for Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018), but the main narrative focus is on her granddaughter (Andi Matichak), making Campbell’s Sidney Prescott a most unique genre proposition. Nonetheless, Scream 4—by refusing to concede that younger figures should be the focus of the so-called “legacy” sequels, goes some way in anticipating the new Halloween franchise. 18. For a wide-ranging discussion of the so-called “torture porn” period I recommend Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation by Aaron Michael Kerner (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). Note, however,

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that here Craven is also disparaging himself again—with the remake films of The Hills Have Eyes discussed within this brief trend. 19. I should note that this concept of “old media” or “methods” being supplanted by hip “new” media has been discussed, with reference to the earlier Scream films (and other horror examples) before. For instance, see Linda Badley, “Bringing it All Back Home: Horror Cinema and Video Culture,” in Ian Conrich, Horror Zone (London: I. B. Taurus, 2010), 45–63. 20. Indeed, many notorious scenes from famous horror films can easily be found removed from their larger narratives on YouTube, from the notorious turtle-death in Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) to videos that show the Scream “kill count.” 21. David Church, Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 11. 22. Ibid., 38. 23. Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. . . and Beyond (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), 124. 24. Ian Conrich, “Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films,” in Alain Silver and James Ursini, Horror Film Reader (New York, NY: Limelight Editions, 2004), 229. 25. When the plane takes off, Craven ensures that it is turbulent: a cheap trick, perhaps, but effective nonetheless. 26. In trapping the two characters together in such a claustrophobic space as an airplane cabin, Red Eye aspires to the minimalist tensions of Rear Window (1954). 27. Craven’s daughter, Jessica, notes her father’s absence in the documentary I Am Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, 2012). 28. The film is also shot in Connecticut, the state that was used for most of The Last House on the Left in 1972. 29. Kendall R. Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 85. 30. Ibid., 120.

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Filmography

films and television shows directed b y w e s c r av e n The Last House on the Left (1972) The Fireworks Woman (1975)* The Hills Have Eyes (1977) A Stranger in Our House (1978) Deadly Blessing (1981) Swamp Thing (1982) Invitation to Hell (1984) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984) Chiller (1985) The Twilight Zone (1985–6, 5 episodes) Deadly Friend (1986) The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987) Shocker (1989) Night Visions (1990) The People Under the Stairs (1991) Nightmare Café (1992) Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) Scream (1996) Scream 2 (1997) Music of the Heart (1999) Scream 3 (2000) Cursed (2005) Red Eye (2005) My Soul to Take (2010) Scream 4 (2011) *Under the pseudonym Abe Snake

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o t h e r f i l m s m e n t i o n e d i n t h i s vo lu m e Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1942) Mom and Dad (William Beaudine, 1945) Belyj Klyk (aka The White Fang) (Aleksandr Zguridi, 1946) Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948) The Mad Magician (John Brahm, 1954) Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960) To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962) Blood Feast (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963) The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966) Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) The Wizard of Gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1970) Goodbye Uncle Tom (Addio Zio Tom) (Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1971) You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It Or You’ll Lose That Beat (1971) Blacula (William Crain, 1972) Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973) Ganja and Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973) The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974) Forced Entry (Shaun Costello, 1974) Memories Within Miss Aggie (Gerard Damiano, 1974) The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (Radley Metzger, 1974) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975) Night Train Murders (L’ultimo treno della note) (Aldo Lado, 1975) Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975) Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976) Death Weekend (aka The House by the Lake) (William Fruet, 1976) Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (Sam O’Steen, 1976) The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Radley Metzger, 1976) Sex Wish (Victor Milt, 1976) Snuff (Michael and Roberta Findlay, 1976) Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

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279

Hitch-Hike (Autostop rosso sangue) (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1977) The Last House on Dead End Street (Roger Watkins, 1977) Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977) Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) Water Power (Shaun Costello, 1977) Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978) Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) Superman: The Movie (Richard Donner, 1978) Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan, Hound of Dracula) (Albert Band, 1979) Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979) Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) City of the Living Dead (Paura nella città dei morti viventi (Lucio Fulci, 1980) Dr. Butcher M.D. (Marino Girolami, 1980) The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) House on the Edge of the Park (La casa sperduta nel parco) (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) Savage Encounter (Bernard Buys, 1980) An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981) Friday the 13th Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981) Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal, 1981) Kent State (James Goldstone, 1981) My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981) The Prowler (Joseph Zito, 1981) Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) Creepshow (George Romero, 1982) Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982) The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982) Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983) The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1983) The Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983) Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983) WarGames (John Badham, 1983) Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984) Starman (John Carpenter, 1984) The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (Danny Steinmann, 1985) The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985) King Solomon’s Mines (J. Lee Thompson, 1985) A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) Real Genius (Martha Coolidge, 1985) Re-animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannon, 1985) Rocky IV (Sylvester Stallone, 1985) Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985) Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (Tom McLoughlin, 1986) Short Circuit (John Badham, 1986) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986) The Gate (Tibor Takács, 1987) Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987)

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filmography

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Bruce Pittman, 1987) Lady Terminator (H. Tjut Djalil, 1987) The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987) Making Mr. Right (Susan Seidelman, 1987) The Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987) Nekromantik (Jörg Buttgereit, 1987) A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987) RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Sidney J. Furie, 1987) Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988) Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight Little, 1988) Maniac Cop (Bill Lustig, 1988) A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Renny Harlin, 1988) Robowar (aka Robot da guerra) (Bruno Mattei, 1988) Sleepaway Camp II (Michael A. Simpson, 1988) They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1988) Harlem Nights (Eddie Murphy, 1989) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Stephen Hopkins, 1989) Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990) Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (Rachel Talalay, 1991) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) Hocus Pocus (Kenny Ortega, 1993) Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Adam Marcus, 1993) Beverly Hills Cop III (John Landis, 1994) Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994) Dangerous Minds (John N. Smith, 1995) Mind Ripper (Joe Gayton, 1995) Small Wonders (Allan Miller, 1995) The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996) The Mirror has Two Faces (Barbara Streisand, 1996) Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997) I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997) Wishmaster (Robert Kurtzman, 1997) Carnival of Souls (Peter Grossman, 1998) Halloween H20 (Steve Miner, 1998) Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) Small Soldiers (Joe Dante, 1998) Urban Legend (Jamie Blanks, 1998) The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) Don’t Look Under the Bed (Kenneth Johnson, 1999) The Green Mile (Frank Darabont, 1999) The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 1999) The Mummy (Stephen Sommers, 1999) Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) Cherry Falls (Geoffrey Wright, 2000) Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000) Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (Kevin Smith, 2001) Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurisawa, 2001)

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281

Carrie (David Carson, 2002) Dog Soldiers (Neil Marshall, 2002) Halloween: Resurrection (Rick Rosenthal, 2002) Comandante (Oliver Stone, 2003) The Haunted Mansion (Rob Minkoff, 2003) Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004) Evil Lenko (David Grieco, 2004) Saw (James Wan, 2004) Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, 2005) Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (Chad Ferrin, 2006) Feast (John Gulager, 2006) The Hills Have Eyes (Alexandre Aja, 2006) Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) Pulse (Jim Sonzero, 2006) When a Stranger Calls (Simon West, 2006) Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007) Prom Night (Nelson McCormick, 2008) Coraline (Henry Sellick, 2009) The Hole (Joe Dante, 2009) Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009) Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010) A Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010) Silent House (Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, 2010) Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011) Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012) Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsky, 2012) I Am Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, 2012) ParaNorman (Chris Butler, Sam Fell, 2012) The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012) The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014) The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco, 2014) The Girl With All the Gifts (Colm McCarthy, 2016) Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) The First Purge (Gerard McMurray, 2018) Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (Ari Sandel, 2018) Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018) Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019) Horror Noire (Xavier Burgin, 2019) Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting (Rachel Talalay, 2020) The Boy Behind the Door (David Charbonier, Justin Powell, 2020) The Vampires Vs the Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020) The Witches (Robert Zemeckis, 2020) Nightbooks (David Yarovesky, 2021)

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filmography

Master (Mariama Diallo, 2022) Scream (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2022) Scream 6 (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2023)

other television shows mentioned in this vo lu m e Mission: Impossible (1966–73) Family Feud (1976–) Moonlighting (1985–9) Laurel Canyon (1993) Ghost Whisperer (2005–10) Medium (2005–11) Paris, je t’aime (2006) Black Mirror (2011–) Stranger Things (2016–) Westworld (2016–) The Movies That Made Us (2019–) Fear Street (2021)

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Index

2001: A Space Odyssey, 124–5, 137 Ackermann, Astrid, 44 Adams, Brandon, 177, 190 Aja, Alexandre, 7, 133, 264 Albee, Edward, 20 An American Werewolf in London, 5, 160 Angela, the Fireworks Woman see The Fireworks Woman Annabelle, 193 Arquette, David, 267 Assault on Precinct 13, 238 Aster, Ari, 269, 274 Attack the Block, 179, 189n A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting, 187 The Babadook, 268–9 Badham, John, 136, 140 Bailey, Fenton, 17 Baker, Rick, 5 Baker, Russell, 20 Ballon, Bob, 25 Balun, Chas, 1–3, 11 Barbato, Randy, 17 Barker, Clive, 168 Barth, John, 21 Bassett, Angela, 226, 238, 241 Baudrillard, Jean, 141 Bayer, Samuel, 7, 209

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Bean, Sawney, 63–67 Beaudine, William, 26 Benson-Allott, Caetlin, 3, 78, 207, 213, 219, 263 Berg, Peter, 163 Bergman, Ingmar, 36, 40, 42, 264 Berryman, Michael, 70 Besson, Luc, 169 Bettinelli-Olpin, Matt, 263, 268 Beverly Hills Cop III, 217 Black Mirror [television series], 135 Blacula, 5, 12, 220, 222–4, 227 Blade Runner, 136 Blair, Kevin, 73 The Blair Witch Project, 39, 45 Blakley, Ronee, 95, 208, 237 Blanks, Jamie, 234 Blood Feast, 39 Bloom, Jeffrey, 246n Bloom, John, 72 Blythe, Janus, 72, 235 Boczar, Amanda Chapman, 3 Boorman, John, 65 Bordwell, David, 7–8, 119, 238 The Boy Behind the Door, 188n Boyz n the Hood, 196 Broecker, Bonnie, 19 Brahm, John, 39

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298 

index

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 219 Brennert, Alan, 120, 123 Bronson, Charles, 41 Brottman, Mikita, 70 Brown, Jennifer, 70 Brubeck, Dave, 23, 26 Bruckner, René Thoreau, 124 Bundy, Ted, 170 Buñuel, Luis, 19 Burgin, Xavier, 179, 241–2 Buried, 152 Burton, Tim, 186 Bush, George, 12, 191, 236, 253 Butler, Chris, 177 Butler, William, 124 Buttgereit, Jörg, 32 Buys, Bernard, 274n Cahn, Barry, 71 Cameron, Alan, 53–4 Campbell, Neve, 81, 265, 267, 270, 274n Campanile, Pasquale Festa, 264 Candyman [2021 remake], 202 Cannibal Holocaust, 12n Carnival of Souls [1998 remake], 8 Carpenter, John, 19, 32, 90, 107, 163, 170, 219, 235, 238–9, 272 Carrie [2002 remake], 188n Carson, David, 188n Cassel, Sandra, 235 Castro, Fidel, 153 Cat People, 221 Chabot, Kevin, 207 Chapin, Harry, 28 Chapin, Steve, 28 Chapin, Tom, 28 Chaplin, Charles, 7 Charbonier, David, 188n Cherry Falls, 235 Child’s Play, 168 Chiller, 4, 120, 237 Christensen, Kyle, 90, 96 Church, David, 13n, 269 Cinefantastique [magazine], 177 Citizen Kane, 8 City of the Living Dead, 152

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Clover, Carol J., 90 Cohen, Larry, 1 Cole, Gary, 124 Coleman, Elliot, 19 Coleman, Robin R. Means, 155–8, 179, 181, 187, 197, 201, 219, 221, 241–3, Colt, Zebedy, 41 Columbus, Chris, 180 Comandante, 153 Coolidge, Martha, 140 Cooper, Camille, 164 Coppola, Francis Ford, 219 Coraline, 178 Corman, Roger, 45 Cornell, Ellie, 267 Cornish, Joe, 179 Corri, Nick, 93, 252 Cortés, Rodrigo, 152 Coscarelli, Don, 1 Costello, Shaun, 41 Cox, Brian, 271 Cox, Courtney, 235 The Craft, 179 Crain, William, 5, 12, 220 Craven, Ian, 8 Craven, Jonathan, 20 Creepshow, 152 Crocker, James, 120 Cronenberg, David, 8, 171, 239, 242, 269 Cundieff, Rusty, 202 Cunningham, Sean, 28, 74, 170, 212–13, 235 Cursed, 5–7, 91, 235, 272–3 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 90, 96, 267, 274n DaCosta, Mia, 202 Diallo, Mariama, 181 Damiano, Gerard, 20, 40–1 Dangerous Minds, 245 Danse Macabre, 1 Dante, Joe, 118, 178, 181, 184 Darabont, Frank, 240 Dayan, Joan, 157 Davis, Wade, 150, 156–7, 227 Dawn of the Dead, 32 Dawn of the Dead [2004 remake], 162

15/06/23 11:19 AM

index 

Deadly Blessing, 4–6, 13n, 120, 166, 235, 247n, 257, Deadly Friend, 4, 8, 11, 31n, 73, 91, 125, 127–8, 133–44, 234–7, 257, 271 Death Weekend, 264 Death Wish, 41 Deep Throat, 40, 42 DeeGuare, Philip, 120 Dekker, Fred, 178 Deliverance, 65 DeMonaco, James, 249, 254–5, 259 Deodato, Ruggero, 12n, 264 Depp, Johnny, 91, 212, 252 The Devil in Miss Jones, 20, 40, 42 Dick, Phillip K., 124 Dieterle, William, 125 Djalil, Tjut H., 135 Dika, Vera, 106 Doctor Sleep, 188n Donner, Richard, 4, 183, 185 Don’t Look Under the Bed, 178 Do The Right Thing, 201 Douglas, Michael, 195 Dracula 2000, 7 Dr. Butcher M.D., 12n Dubois, Laurent, 159, 161n Duvalier, François, 149, 153, 158 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 149, 157, 159 Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, 114n Ebert, Roger, 39, 244 Edmonds, Don, 43 Edwards, Eric, 42 Ellsworth, Carl, 271 Ellison, Harlan, 118, 120–1 The Empire Strikes Back, 175n Englund, Robert, 1, 10, 87, 102, 128, 204, 265 Epstein, Jeffrey, 106 Estefan, Gloria, 241 Eve’s Bayou, 179, 187 The Evil Dead, 234 Evil Lenko, 114n The Exorcist, 183

8203_Waddel.indd 299

299

Fangoria [magazine], 77 Fanon, Frantz, 240 Fast, Howard, 30n Feast, 7 Fell, Sam, 177 Fellini, Federico, 19 Ferrin, Chad, 114n Fiennes, Sophie, 174 Findlay, Michael, 32 Findlay, Roberta, 32 The Fireworks Woman, 3–4, 9, 41–2 Fischoff, Stu, 20–2, 26–8 Fishburne, Lawrence, 196, 242 Flanagan, Mike, 188n Fleischer, Ruben, 162 Fleming, Andrew, 179 Flowers in the Attic, 246n The Fog, 238 Forced Entry, 41 Ford, John, 7–8 Foucault, Michel, 52, 61 The Fountain Society, 19 Frankenheimer, John, 269 Frankenweenie, 186 Frechette, Peter, 73 Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, 210, 214n, 266 Freud, Sigmund, 165–6, 170 Fruet, William, 264 Friday the 13th, 28, 74, 170, 212, 235 Friday the 13th Part 2, 109 Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, 179, 274n Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, 262 Friedkin, William, 118, 183 Fulci, Lucio, 152, 162 Fuhrman, Mark, 223 Furie, Sidney J., 128 Ganja and Hess, 220, 227 Gasser, Urs, 135 The Gate, 178 Gayton, Joe, 7, 133 Geggel, Laura, 165 Getino, Octavio, 236 Get Out, 177, 180, 191, 202, 243–4, 269

15/06/23 11:19 AM

300 

index

The Ghost in the Machine, 169 Ghost Whisperer [television series], 162 The Girl With All the Gifts, 179 Guilfoyle, Paul, 151 Gibson, William, 139 Gillespie, Jim, 100, 234 Gillett, Tyler, 263, 268 Girard, Wendy, 125 Girolami, Marino, 12n Giuliani, Rudy, 222 Godard, Jean-Luc, 236 Goldstein, Brian D., 195 Goldstone, James, 236 Goodbye Uncle Tom, 160 The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, 26 The Goonies, 185 Goosebumps, 177 Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, 178 Gordon, Lance, 75 Gordon, Stuart, 163 Grantham, Lucy, 235 Green, David Gordon, 274n The Green Mile, 240 Gremlins, 178, 183 Grieco, David, 114n Grieve, Russ, 79 Grossman, Peter, 8 The Guardian [newspaper], 4 Gulager, John, 7 Guariento, Stephen, 264 Gunn, Bill, 220 Hall, Jerry, 224–225 Halloween, 19, 32, 90–1, 96–7, 99, 107, 170, 219, 221, 235, 238 Halloween [2018 sequel], 274n Halloween II, 96 Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers, 267 Halloween: H20, 274n Halloween: Resurrection, 274n Hantke, Steffen, 235 Hardison, Kadeem, 221 Hardy, Robin, 54, 269 Harkins, Gillian, 105 Harlem Nights, 217

8203_Waddel.indd 300

Harlin, Renny, 214n, 241 Harlins, Latasha, 223 Harper, Jim, 235 Hartley, Daniel A., 197 Heffner, Richard D., 212–13 Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, 262 Hellraiser, 168 Heneage, John, 18, 20–1, 24–5, 29 Henstell, Diana, 133 Hereditary, 273 Heritage, Stuart, 4 Herman, Judith, 108 Hess, David, 38, 264 The Hills Have Eyes, 1–3, 5, 8, 10, 52–68, 70–1, 74–9, 119, 133, 163, 217, 219, 235, 238, 248, 256, 264, 267 The Hills Have Eyes [2007 remake], 7, 264 The Hills Have Eyes Part II, 4, 6, 8, 10, 61, 70–81, 89, 242, 265 The Hills Have Eyes 2, 265 Hitchcock, Alfred, 41, 126 Hitch-Hike, 264 Hocus Pocus, 178 The Hole, 178, 184 Holland, Tom, 168 Holwill, Naomi, 43 Home Alone, 180 hooks, bell, 185 Hooper, Tobe, 1, 6, 32, 171, 242, 265 Hopkins, Stephen, 209, 242 Horror Noire, 179, 241–2 Hotel Transylvania, 178 House on the Edge of the Park, 264 Houston, Robert, 72 Howard, Michael, 215n Hughes, John, 140 Hughes, Miko, 204 Hughey, Matthew W., 240 Humphries, Reynold, 210 Hutson, Thommy, 18 I Know What You Did Last Summer, 100n, 234–5 Iliadis, Dennis, 7, 264 Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, 43

15/06/23 11:19 AM

index 

Inside Deep Throat, 17, 28 Interview with the Vampire, 229n The Integrator [newspaper], 26–7 Invitation to Hell, 8, 81, 120 It Follows, 269 Jackson, Michael, 120 Jacobsen, Josephine, 20 Jacopetti, Gualtiero, 160 Jameson, Fredric, 262 Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, 266 Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, 265 Johnson, Kenneth, 178 Johnson, Penny, 73 Jones, Amy Holden, 45 Jones, Duane, 43, 220 Jones, Steve, 209 Jordan, Jennifer, 42 Kairo, 143, 268 Karolyi, Bela, 108 Karolyi, Martha, 108 Kenan, Gil, 178 Kendrick, James, 90, 212 Kennedy, John F., 29n, 95–6, 236 Kentis, Chris, 114n Kent, Jennifer, 268 Kent State, 236 Kerekes, David, 264 Kershner, Irvin, 175 Kim, Richard, 20 King, Martin Luther, 43 King, Rodney, 191, 218, 222 King, Stephen, 1, 193 King Solomon’s Mines, 154 Koestler, Arthur, 169 Kubrick, Stanley, 124, 137 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 143, 268 Kurtzman, Robert, 7, 168 Kurzweil, Ray, 140 Labyorteaux, Matthew, 138 Lacan, Jacques, 166 Lado, Aldo, 264

8203_Waddel.indd 301

301

Lady Terminator, 136 Landis, John, 5, 120, 160, 217 Langenkamp, Heather, 9, 87, 89, 103, 204–14, 235, 237, 252, 265 Langer, A.J., 190 The Last House on Dead End Street, 41 The Last House on the Left, 1, 3, 5, 8–9, 25, 31n, 32–49, 78, 88–9, 91, 93, 99, 119, 138–9, 142, 166, 174, 205, 212–13, 214n, 223, 227, 233–8, 243, 245, 246n, 248–53, 255, 257–8, 267, 269, 271–2 The Last House on the Left [2009 remake], 7, 264, 271 Lawrence, Novotny, 220 Laughlin, John, 73 Lau, Laura, 114n Laurel Canyon, 4 Lee, Christopher, 220 Lee, Spike, 201 Lemmons, Kasi, 179, 187 Lennard, Dominic, 184 Lenzi, Umberto, 45 Leone, Sergio, 26 Leonetti, John R., 193 Lester, T. William, 197 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 62 Lewis, Herschell Gordon, 39, 43 Lieberman, Jeff, 5 Lillard, Matthew, 265 Lipsyte, Robert, 224 Little, Dwight, 267 Locke, Peter, 28, 70–1 Lockwood, Gary, 125 The Lost Boys, 180 Lovecraft Country [television series], 191 Lowenstein, Adam, 236, 238, 252 Lucas, George, 166 Lucy, 169 Lugosi, Bela, 220 Lussier, Patrick, 7 Lustig, Bill, 109 Lyon, Ken, 18, 20–5, 28 Maasen, Kasper, 46 Macoute, Tonton, 158

15/06/23 11:19 AM

302 

index

Madonna, 128 The Mad Magician, 39 Making Mr. Right, 136 Maldoror, Sarah, 236 Maltby, Richard, 8 Manfredini, Harry, 74 Maniac Cop, 109 Marcus, Adam, 266 Marcus, Richard, 138, 237 Marquand, Richard, 167 Marshall, William, 220 Martin, George R. R., 118 Marx, Karl, 222, 225 Master, 181 Matichak, Andi, 274n The Matrix, 240 Mattei, Bruno, 137 Matthews, Tom Dewe, 234 Maxwell, Richard, 157 McAdams, Rachel, 270–271 McCarthy, Colm, 179 McConaghy, Rob, 18, 20–1, 25–6, 29 McCormick, Nelson, 268 McFadzean, Angus, 181 McGill, Everett, 190 McLoughlin, Tom, 262 McLuhan, Marshall, 171–3 Medium [television series], 162 Memories Within Miss Aggie, 41 Metzger, Radley, 40 Meyer, Breckin, 210 Meyer, Russ, 32 Meyers, Ric, 103 Middendorf, Tracy, 206 Midsommar, 269 Mihalka, George, 109, 274n Millais, John Everett, 40 Mind Ripper, 7, 133 Miner, Steve, 109, 274n Minter, Kelly Jo, 192, 242 Mitchell, David Robert, 269 Mokae, Zakes, 153 Mom and Dad, 26 Mondo Brutale see The Last House on the Left Monster High, 177

8203_Waddel.indd 302

Monster House, 182–3 The Monster Squad, 178, 181, 189n Moonlighting [television series], 121 Moran, James M., 205, 207 Morgan, C.W., 237 Morricone, Ennio, 26 The Movies That Made Us, 3 Muir, John Kenneth, 63, 79–80, 149, 192 The Mummy, 168 Murphy, Bernice M., 181–2 Murphy, Cillian, 170 Murphy, Eddie, 217–19, 241 Murphy, Michael, 163 Music of the Heart, 5, 12, 128, 233–45 My Bloody Valentine, 109, 274n Myrick, Daniel, 39 My Soul to Take, 6, 81, 91, 166, 235, 248, 263, 266, 271–3 Nakata, Hideo, 171 Nassar, Larry, 106, 108 Nekromantik, 32 Newkirk, Toy, 242 Newland, Paul, 53 Newman, Kim, 8, 212 Newitz, Annalee, 196, 198 Newsom, David, 206 Nightbooks, 180 Nightmare Café, 4, 128 A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1–5, 10–11, 17, 29n, 33, 71–3, 81, 87–99, 102–14, 118–20, 133, 142, 152, 154, 160, 163, 165–6, 180, 204, 217, 223, 234, 237–8, 240, 248–9, 252–3, 257, 259, 265, 267, 272, 274n A Nightmare on Elm Street [2010 remake], 209 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, 112, 214n A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, 4, 84n, 89, 112, 128, 204, 241–2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, 214n, 241–2 A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, 209, 242

15/06/23 11:19 AM

index 

Night of the Living Dead, 43, 162, 181, 198 Night of Vengeance see The Last House on the Left Night Train Murders, 264 Night Visions, 4, 190 Nixon, Richard, 95 O’Bannon, Dan, 163 The Omen, 183 The Opening of Misty Beethoven, 40 Oring, Elliot, 63–4 Ortega, Jenny, 268 Ortega, Kenny, 178 Pacino, Al, 151 Palfrey, John, 135 Panettiere, Hayden, 268 Pandora Experimentia, 9, 17–29 ParaNorman, 177–8, 184 Paris, je t’aime, 5 Peele, Jordan, 177, 188n, 191, 202, 243–4, 269 Pentland, Gordon, 65 The People Under the Stairs, 5–6, 9, 11–12, 13n, 81, 91, 95, 142, 177–87, 190–202, 235–6, 242, 247n, 248, 253–5, 259, 271–2, Perkins, Claire, 209 The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, 174 Phillips, Kendall R., 30n, 134, 211, 214, 219, 272 Pierce, Charles B., 5 Pileggi, Mitch, 140, 163, 218 Pinedo, Isabel, 262 Pitt, Brad, 229n Pittman, Bruce, 262 Playboy [magazine], 4 Pleasence, Donald, 97 Podoshen, Jeffrey, 89 Poe, Edgar Allan, 123, 152 Polanski, Roman, 118 Poltergeist, 171 Portrait of Jennie, 125 Powell, Justin, 188n

8203_Waddel.indd 303

303

The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, 40–1 Prom Night [2008 remake], 268 Prosperi, Franco, 160 The Prowler, 109 Pryor, Richard, 223 Psycho, 41 Pugh, Willard, 73 Pullman, Bill, 150–1, 227 Pulse, 143, 268 The Purge, 12, 249–50, 254–9 The Purge: Anarchy, 12, 249–250, 254–9 Purrington, Maxwell, 165 Quinn, Aidan, 239 Rabid, 269 Raimi, Sam, 242 Randall, Julia, 20 Ray, Nicholas, 93 Reagan, Nancy, 192 Reagan, Ronald, 12, 89–91, 99, 118, 191–2, 197, 236, 239, 250, 252–3 Real Genius, 140 Re-animator, 163 Rebel Without a Cause, 93 Red Eye, 5, 128, 263, 266, 270–1, 273 Reeve, Christopher, 128 Reems, Harry, 41 Return of the Jedi, 167 Return of the Living Dead, 163 Rhames, Ving, 185, 190 Rilla, Wolf, 184 Riley, Colleen, 73 Ringu, 171, 205 Roberts, Conrad, 151 Roberts, Emma, 266 Roberts, Jeremy, 190 Robie, Wendy, 142, 190 Robinson, J. Peter, 206 RoboCop, 137 Robowar, 137 Rockoff, Adam, 4, 102 Rocky IV, 147 Rodriguez, Osmany, 187, 202

15/06/23 11:19 AM

304 

index

Romero, George, 1, 8, 32, 43, 45, 152, 181, 272 Rosemary’s Baby, 118 Rosenthal, Rick, 96, 274n Rothman, Stephanie, 45 Rubin, Bruce Joel, 138, 142 Russell, Chuck, 4, 92, 112, 128, 204, 241 Ryle, Gilbert, 169 Sagoes, Ken, 241 Sánchez, Eduardo, 39 The Sandbox, 20 Sandel, Ari, 178 Sarris, Andrew, 8 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20 Saunders, Mel, 118 Savage Encounter, 274n Saw, 268 Saxon, John, 94, 110, 204 Scheffler, Marc, 251 Schifrin, Lalo, 26 Schumacher, Joel, 180 Scorsese, Martin, 111 Scott, Ridely, 136 Scovell, Adam, 55 Scream, 1, 4–5, 11, 21, 81, 89, 128, 133, 140, 142, 163, 166, 173, 209, 219–21, 233–7, 240, 248, 257, 262, 264–5, 269, 272 Scream 2, 244, 247n Scream 3, 212, 265–6 Scream 4, 6, 9, 12, 45, 140, 235, 263, 266, 268–73 Scream [television series], 7 Scream [2022 film], 263, 268–70 Scream VI, 263 The Searchers, 8, 17 Seconds, 269 Seeger, Pete, 19 Seely, Joe, 209 Seidelman, Susan, 137 Sellick, Henry, 178 The Serpent and the Rainbow, 4, 11, 135, 149–60, 190, 193, 227, 230n, 236–7, 242, 271

8203_Waddel.indd 304

Sex Wish, 41 Sharett, Christopher, 233 Sharrett, Michael, 138 The Shawshank Redemption, 240 Shaye, Robert, 71, 204, 206, 214n, 233 Shelley, Mary, 169 Shelton, Marley, 277 Sherman, Bill, 27 Sherman, Gary, 5 Shivers, 269 Shivers [magazine], 5 Shocker, 4, 8, 11, 75, 140, 143, 162–74, 190, 218–19, 234–5, 271 Sholder, Jack, 112 Short Circuit, 136 Simpson, Joyce, 24 Simpson, Michael A., 267 Simpson, Nicole Brown, 223 Simpson, O. J., 223–5, 227, 229n, 230n Singleton, John, 196 Skeleton Key, 193 Slater, David, 264 Sleepaway Camp II, 267, 274n Slumber Party Massacre, 45 Sluizer, George, 152 Small Soldiers, 181 Smith, Jada Pinkett, 247n Smith, John N., 245 Smith, Kevin, 265 Snake, Abe, 4 Snyder, Zack, 162 Softley, Iain, 193 Solanas, Fernando, 236 Sommers, Stephen, 168 Sonzero, Jim, 143, 268 Staiger, Janet, 238 Springer, Jerry, 170 Stallone, Sylvester, 137 Steadman, John, 75 Sterling, Rod, 120 Snuff, 32 Songsti, Noah, 30n Speer, Martin, 58 Stafford, Tamara, 73 Stagecoach, 8 Starman, 238

15/06/23 11:19 AM

index 

Star Wars, 166 Steinmann, Danny, 179, 274n Stone, Oliver, 153, 195 Straight, Beatrice, 237 A Stranger in our House, 3, 8, 109, 118, 199 Streep, Meryl, 128, 236, 240–1, 244 Stuart, Charles Edward, 64 Stuart, James Edward, 64 Sudlow, Penelope, 209 Summer of Fear see A Stranger in Our House Superman: The Movie, 4 Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, 128 Swanson, Kristy, 138, 235 Swamp Thing, 4, 8, 13n, 71, 135, 236–7, 242 Tabori, Kristoffer, 124 Takács, Tibor, 178 Talalay, Rachel, 169, 187, 210, 266 Tales from the Hood, 202 Tartakovsky, Genndy, 178 Taxi Driver, 111 The Terminator, 136 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 32, 63, 65, 274n The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, 265 They Live, 163, 174 Thieriot, Max, 271 Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, 178 Thomas, Terry, 105 Thomson, David, 125 Thompson, J. Lee, 154 Thompson, Kristin, 7–8, 238 Thoms, William John, 56 Timpone, Tony, 77 To Kill a Mockingbird, 163 Toland, Gregg, 8 Tourneur, Jacques, 221 Truffaut, François, 8, 19 Trump, Donald, 6 The Twilight Zone, 3, 11, 118–28 Twomey, Anne, 125, 138 Tyson, Cathy, 151 Ulrich, Skeet, 265

8203_Waddel.indd 305

305

Upstairs, Downstairs [television series], 200 Urban Legend, 234–235 Us, 188n, 202 Vampire in Brooklyn, 5, 8, 12, 190, 193, 217–28, 234, 237–8, 241–2, Vampires vs. the Bronx, 187, 202, 203n The Vanishing, 152 Vaughn, Stephen, 212 Verhoeven, Paul, 137 Vertigo, 126 Videodrome, 171 Village of the Damned, 184 The Virgin Spring, 36, 264, 269 Wachowski, Lana, 240 Wachowski, Lilly, 240 Wallace, Dee, 75 Wall Street, 195 Wan, James, 268 WarGames, 140 Water Power, 41 Waters, John, 8 wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ, 240 Watkins, Peter, 8 Watkins, Roger, 41 Wee, Valarie, 263 Weinstein, Bob, 5–6, 273 Weinstein, Harvey, 5, 106, 273 Weird Science, 140 Weisz, Martin, 265 Welles, Orson, 7 Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, 5, 9, 12, 84n, 89, 104, 128, 190, 204–14, 219, 227, 237, 265, 269–72 West, Cornel, 244 West, Simon, 268 Westworld [television series], 61, 135 Whalen, Sean, 190 Wharton, Sarah, 209 When a Stranger Calls [2006 remake], 268 Whitehill, Joseph, 20 Whitehouse, Mary, 204 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, 20 The Wicker Man, 54, 61, 269

15/06/23 11:19 AM

306 

index

Wilde, Oscar, 5 Williamson, Bruce, 4 Williamson, Kevin, 128, 262, 265 Willis, Bruce, 121–3 Wilson, David, 105 Winnicott, Donald, 165 Winner, Michael, 41 Winston, Stan, 6 Wishman, Doris, 8 Wishmaster, 7, 168 The Witches, 187 Witherspoon, John, 222 The Wizard of Gore, 39 Wojcik-Andrews, Ian, 180 Wollen, Peter, 7 Wood, Robin, 1–2, 9–10, 12, 39, 42–3, 56, 67, 70, 79, 87–91, 99, 102, 154, 170, 217, 223, 235–6, 243, 255, 269

8203_Waddel.indd 306

Woodrum, Donna, 92 Woods, James, 171 Wooley, John, 18–19, 27, 57 Wright, Geoffrey, 225 Wright, Ray, 143 Wyss, Amanda, 92, 103, 209, 252 Yarovesky, David, 180 Yeats, William Butler, 124 You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It Or You’ll Lose That Beat, 28 Zedong, Mao, 250 Zemeckis, Robert, 187 Zinoman, Jason, 18, 28 Zito, Joseph, 109 Zombi 2, 162 Zombieland, 162

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