"...Film fans were so taken with the jumbled, confused world of bodies and dreams, that Freddy Krueger became a cultural icon of an age of anxiety...We can run but Freddy guarantees that we can't hide! He becomes a celebrity..."

Certainly, horror films continued to be made after the classic period, up to and including the present day.  But something has happened to filmic horror, something contained in the modern...

By JOHN F. CROSSEN

(We welcome John F. Crossen to the HORROR-WOOD fold.  John is a native of Arizona (a true desert rat) now living in the wilds of North Central Pennsylvania. He is an assistant professor of Spanish at Mansfield University. In addition to all things Hispanic, he enjoys all things horror. He is an associate editor of the recently inaugurated Journal of Dracula Studies. John collects horror-related autographs and Dracula memorabilia. His favorite Scream Queen is still Fay Wray.)

In places where things are happening, one can't avoid
running into some degree of horror.
-- Graham Greene, The Other Man

In 1966, Time proclaimed that God was dead. In 1967, Anton LeVay founded the First Church of Satan in San Francisco. In 1968, Roman Polanski filmed a world empty of God and full of Satanic Self--Rosemary's Baby. It was about this time, I believe, that many of the heroes of horrors past started thinking of hanging up their stars and reserving boxes on the Hollywood Squares. Horror was on the brink of a new age itself. With the birth of Rosemary's cuddly lil' Antichrist, the old fairy tales of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman just couldn't hold the kid's attention...or ours. A different incarnation of terror had come into the world.

1973 may be the real year of the death knell of classic horror and classic monsters. The devil had a firm grip on the box office with the release of The Exorcist. Christopher Lee turned in his cape as Hammer Films started to slide towards eventual bankruptcy. Vincent Price called it quits (sort of) soon after Madhouse came out. The scripts were looking more and more dreadful, he moaned; he decided the kitchen and his cookbooks were more to his taste...Besides, Hollywood Squares had offered him a special square whenever he wished. Karloff had died in 1969; Chaney, Jr. followed in 1973. And John Carradine, well, he didn't care. They all took a walk in the sunshine and faded from view. Or so it seemed. The horrors that were pushing their way onto the screen were more raw, more in your face than anything they had known. But more importantly: the modern horrors of the post-Christian world preferred to haunt our bodies in the cities, in our bedrooms, and refused to be confined to those out of the way cemeteries and creaky mansions. The horrors were within, wanting out.

In The Exorcist, Regan is a preteen, a young woman in process...And she is under assault. The demon Pazusu (under the guise of Captain Howdy) takes advantage of her naiveté and enters her body. As a result, Regan's body becomes an arena of conflicting forces a tableau within which evil tries to control her, and through her, us. In her fearsome struggles, her body serves even as a writing pad on which the poor girl scribbles "Help me." Her body is not only threatened but threatening. A whole salvation play is played out in her bedroom, spinning beds and head and all. In the end, the demon departs, but to where? Into Father Karras, the tormented priest of modern angst, and into the night. But it is the female body that has been violated and that has violated. The pattern of future horrors has been imprinted on our imaginations and on our souls.

Next comes Carrie (1976). Another woman in process, the focus of the horror on her changing body, within and without. A tormented psyche finds expression in this body. It shapes her as surely as nature. All she needs is a little prompting and she lets it all hang out...and burns us to a crisp. Once again, a female body is more than an object of torment, it becomes a cannon of horror, letting loose a powerful rage upon the world. In the doing, the woman's body makes the transition complete from victim to victimizer.

Certainly, there would be reactionary figures on the way to an established new identity for horror, embodied in its objects of fright, the women who give modern fear its tell-tale sound: the scream. There were The Stepford Wives (1975), but one always suspected that at any moment they'd rebel against the men who had crafted them. Just biding their time while they did the shopping. And Jamie Lee Curtis, while assuming the mantle of Fay Wray for the Seventies and Eighties, still managed to put up a good fight against the Bogeyman in Halloween (1978). (We would later learn [but not surprisingly] that Michael Myers was her brother, and so, both sides of fright ran in the family.) But the legacy of the Seventies was a transition in horror that would not be denied: from then on, Scream Queens could scream as well as incite screams, and more often than not, do both. Dread was an ambiguity; the last of the frontier's virginal body threatened had broken down...The virgin herself was the one to fear. No more heroes, no more maidens. Only wonderment at who might be the one to avoid, or run from.

In the Seventies, horror began focusing on the female body as an arena of evil impulses, threatening to break out and impose their will on the world. This becomes the type of horror experienced on the screen. We see it in the destructive delusions of the mental patient in Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971); we cringe at it in the possessed body of the girl in The Exorcist; and we jump away from it in the blowing waves of anger in Carrie. With the Eighties, female bodies are so charged with horror they threaten to lose control. The bodies that have been victimized, seem to be coming loose at the seams...

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock created the modern horror film in Psycho. Horror becomes co-identified with the human body, male and female, but in the final evaluation nothing but Female. Norman is his mother Norma; and Norma is the house, the fruit cellar, the shower, the knife...Mother haunts and terrorizes everything and everyone. Her physical body may be a skeletal corpse, but her real (and reel) body is Norman. More precisely, his body, which is never his. Mother consumes all. Mother is all. But she may be re-buried in one form and locked away in another. By 1980, Mother did not need another body to kill, she could take care of matters all by herself, thank you! The film: Friday the 13th. Mrs. Voorhees, Jason's pissed-off mom, reveals herself as the slasher in the denouement of F13; we see a reflection of Norma Bates, but a Norma Bates out of control, uncontainable within her own body. She cannot stop from wanting to destroy, and in the end, quite literally she loses her head. Giving into bloody rage, cutting and chopping without limit, she falls to pieces.

In Linnea Quigley's character in The Return of the Living Dead (1983), we see this played out further. The early scenes show us a punkette who cannot control her desires, whether they be to strip off her clothing on a whim or to dance naked upon the graves. Later, after she has been zombiefied, she becomes a relentless eating machine, running down a cop and chomping down upon his skull without a single moment's hesitation. She is pure primal force.

Even when the Eighties allow horror an occasional nod towards its classic roots, as in Fright Night (1985) and The Monster Squad (1987), the monsters are consummate nihilists, forces of nature that mow down and dismantle their victims. And the most beastly at this craft are the female monsters out of control bitches that grin and tear without pity. (Can anyone forget Charlie Brewster's vampirized girlfriend, her wildly distorted mouth like some insane vision of a Vagina Dentata wanting, hoping to devour the boy in Fright Night?) In The Howling (1981), it is a female werewolf that starts the terror moving, first by attacking Dee Wallace's husband, and then by copulating with him, helping him to lose control, too, and join her in wolfish bliss. The female body becomes a sight of brutish initiation.

It is through a woman's dreams that Fred Krueger enters the horror scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven's paean to the breakdown of distinctions between the inner and outer worlds. Tina reveals a new monster that may be the oldest monster: collective guilt visiting the next generation, and destroying it. A whole generation of children are dying for what their parents did. Right or wrong, it doesn't matter; vengeance will always come back. And it will cross any boundary to achieve its aims. Reality fragments, and horror rules. It takes another woman, Nancy, to defeat the monster. But then, as the finale suggests, even her victory may be another dream, the one before the true nightmare begins. Without boundaries between the worlds, who can say where it starts or ends?

Film fans were so taken with the jumbled, confused world of bodies and dreams, that Freddy Krueger became a cultural icon of an age of anxiety. In the last days of the Cold War, even our inner landscapes were no sanctuary from life's horrors. We can run but Freddy guarantees that we can't hide! He becomes a celebrity.

And here, we see another shift in horror from of old: No more horror stars (Lugosi, Karloff, Price, and so on); only horror characters. Horror films become franchises. Sequel after sequel is what it's all about, not for personality sake or even art, but for pure profit: Jason follows on Jason, Michael Myers on Michael Myers, Chucky on Chucky, and Freddy...well, he is eternal. Or so the endless Nightmare sequels assure us. Even Norman Bates gets in on the act, with Psycho coming back for three more rounds. (Mother Norma can't let Mrs. Voorhees get away with all the mayhem. She will better her on this score.) The Me Generation finds its counterpart in the horror genre: horror as unleashed consumerism.

Finally, the Eighties' consumer horror spills over onto its biggest commodity: its female bodies. And those who know how best to market those bodies, its Scream Queens, create a new franchise: themselves.

The body-obsessed horror of the splatter films raises up new celebrities in ladies like Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, and Michelle Bauer. Embracing the two dimensions of horror in the Eighties (women as victim and victimizer), they fuse them into lasting careers with no apologies. Unlike Jamie Lee Curtis, who denied her Scream Queen roots (until he revisited them for filthy lucre in Halloween H20), the Scream Queens of the Eighties are powerful women who channel their power in self-promotion, and bloodier roles. If it means their screen personas lose control from time to time, then so be it. After all, horror knows no boundaries any longer.

(This is) what is wrong today with some of the "fright" films: they
have no logic at all, things begin happening at the very first scene and
they don't end until everybody's been destroyed. Al Pacino in
Scarface...I was hysterical by the end of it because there was nobody
left alive in Miami!
-- Vincent Price (1987)

Bodies and body fluids in the Eighties became very threatening. The AIDS scare, and the outbreaks of new strains of other STDs, and exotic viruses like Ebola and Hanta rendered our lifescapes very scary places to be. And the horrors of the cinema were not going to let us escape from these threats. The bodies in horror films continued to threaten as well: automatons like Jason in the umpteenth sequel of Friday the 13th; Freddy still slashing at us with his finger-knives in our waking dreams; and new distortions of pain and fear stalked our inner hells with exotic names like "Pinhead." Threatening to tear our souls apart, these denizens of Clive Barker's bodily infernos prowled with abandon. And like the bodies around us, the bodies of the screen were falling apart, fragmenting...dissolving.

The Nineties is witness to postmodern horror. Postmodernism may be defined any number of ways but a common feature is fragmentation; the atomizing of morals (no more claims to absolutes), the confusion of good and evil, and the loss of stable societal and philosophical structures. Community is a series of individuals. No one can be trusted. Appearances are nearly always deceiving. A world of Generation X where X means anything goes. No happy endings, only hoped-for painless escapes. Images on the TV and on the Web dominate; rapid-fire blurs of unrelated subjects, each equally valid and equally forgettable. Amnesia is common; anesthesia is the norm.

As such, cinematic horror reflects this postmodernist fragmentation with its fragmented bodies: The slasher picture ruled the first half, with its flying body parts, and countless mutilations. New masters of this nihilism emerged: "Candyman," the "Warlock" and the "Wishmaster" to name a few. Now, towards the end of the decade, Wes Craven has accomplished the impossible: spoofing the nihilism in the Scream movies, with teen killers imitating their horror heroes, and emulating them. It's so funny because it's so frightening. One good slash deserves another, with a smile and a wink! The breakdown, fragmentation of horror is complete. Is it comedy, terror, both, or neither?

The Nineties also saw two more of the horror stars pass on: first Vincent Price and then Peter Cushing. Only Christopher Lee remains and he's quite happy steering clear of the postmodern horror scene.

A few filmmakers tried their hands at resurrecting the classic monsters: Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994). But these were not the authors' or the books' monsters at all, but fragments of classic horror traditions uneasily fused to fragments of the splatter film. The results were stylish, expensive looks with liberal splashes of blood. The products seemed loosely made, threatening to fall apart. Part and parcel of a postmodern world.

Women in horror are a mixed lot, as the Seventies and Eighties assured us they would be. Their bodies alternate between objects of attack and attacking objects. Video horror has fragmented the world of the Scream Queens that the term seems to have lost its meaning any woman with a sexy body may have her 15 minutes of fame in a horror film and thus be called a Scream Queen. Part and parcel of a postmodern world.

One woman reigns above the rest, the first female horror star to have a series so intimately identified with her character, no one can imagine another film without her: Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien (1978), Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1997). She's the only woman to define a franchise from the Seventies to the Nineties. The films describe the evolution of horror in each decade, posited in the female body; every major theme is summed up and displayed: the Seventies' transition of woman as victim to a power in herself (1978); the Eighties' bending of roles, and issues of control; the Mother Ripley battling the Mother Alien, each in the end becoming like each other, brutal, vicious, desperate, out of control; and the Nineties breakdown of distinctions--Ripley is the Mother of a new Queen Alien, and then becomes a hybrid of the Alien/Human connection. In the end, as she looks down upon the earth she has not seen for centuries, she is no longer Ripley, but is Ripley, both human, and other, and neither. The fragmentation of identity, and Ripley's ambiguous demeanor, steal away all our confidence. Hero and monster are one and the same at last.

Weaver has even moved female horror back to its fairy tale roots, with Snow White: Tale of Terror (1996). But the world portrayed is not Disneyfied; it is a world obsessed with bodies, both in beauty and in procreation. To lose either means losing all, and one's sanity, too. The final effect: Even the Brothers Grimm have been reduced to storytellers of fragmentation. There is no security at bedtime, anywhere...ever.

All this adds up to this conclusion for horror in the Nineties: One cannot identify it because the fragments are too many. It's a pleasant exercise to watch savvy, sassy teens send up the horrors of the video generation in Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend. (I even hear Chucky has taken a Bride!). But these are commentary on the horrors of the Seventies and Eighties. As we laugh, we remember how horror evolved (devolved?) from monsters to bodies to body parts and wonder: can we ever put the shattered, disembodied parts back together? Do we want to?

Thanks, John, for an incisive analysis of where the "fun" seems to have gone out of "fright" and all we're left with are the ravaged "bodies" of the classic horror cinema tradition.   Cheers!

Article copyright John F. Crossen

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