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The popular cultural ubiquity of the zombie in the years following the Second World War is testament to that monster‘s remarkable ability to adapt to the social anxieties of the age. From the red-scare zombie-vampire hybrids of I Am Legend (1954) onwards, the abject alterity of the ambulant dead has been deployed as a means of interrogating everything from the war in Vietnam (Night of the Living Dead, 1968) to the evils of consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978). This essay explores how, in the years since 9/11, those questions of ethnicity and gender, regionality and power that have haunted the zombie narrative since 1968 have come to articulate the social and cultural dislocations wrought by free-market economics and the shock doctrines that underscore the will to global corporatism. The article examines these dynamics through consideration of the figure of the zombie in a range of contemporary cultural texts drawn from film, television, graphic fiction, literature and gaming, each of which articulates a sense not only neo-liberalism itself has failed but simply wont lie down and die. It is therefore argued that in an age of corporate war and economic collapse, community breakdown and state-sanctioned torture, the zombie apocalypse both realises and works through the failure of the free market, its victims shuffling through the ruins, avatars of the contemporary global self.
This book explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state. Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, its analysis ranges from the body horror of the American 1970s to the avant-garde proclivities of German Reunification horror, from the vengeful supernaturalism of recent Japanese chillers and their American remakes to the post-Thatcherite masculinity horror of the UK and the resurgence of hillbilly horror in the period following 9/11 USA. In each case, it is argued that horror cinema forces us to look again at the wounds inflicted on individuals, families, communities and nations by traumatic events such as genocide and war, terrorist outrage and seismic political change, wounds that are all too often concealed beneath ideologically expedient discourses of national cohesion. Thus proffering a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, horror cinema is seen to offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.
This chapter addresses some concerns of British horror cinema with specific reference to an extraordinary proliferation of what Noël Carroll would term ‘fusion monsters’, represented in various films. In each of these highly self-reflexive films a new kind of ‘fusion hero’ can also be seen to emerge: one who undertakes a hybridisation of earlier models of British masculinity in his mission to conquer the monster and become a man. Thus, in new millennial British horror one can also see not only a tendency to parody and pastiche earlier horror texts but a will to explore earlier models of British masculinity—specifically those drawn from Britain's imperial past. As such, attitudes to women are highly significant in each of these films. Thus a new form of masculine identity can be seen to emerge from the ruins: one that is simultaneously hard-hitting and gentle, innovative and steady, decisive and compassionate. British horror of the new millennium not only points to the traumatised nature of the contemporary British male self-image but to the ways in which it is possible to work through the horror and, in so doing, become a new kind of man. Various examples of films are also presented that are indicative of the patterns followed in British cinema.
This chapter explores the remarkable cinematic resurgence of hillbilly horror in the years since 9/11. For as George W. Bush pits the ostensible civilisation of the United States (US) against the oriental barbarism of the terrorist threat, providing himself in the process with justification for both the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the introduction of a range of ‘homeland security’ measures that have restricted US civil liberties with an effectiveness that would have made Nixon proud, a new generation of horror film makers have brought the next generation of hillbillies to cinema screens. Engaging with the traumatic inheritance of 9/11 though the new hillbilly horror, like Trauma Studies itself, is concerned with the complex relation between knowing and not knowing the truth, seeing and not seeing the wounds inflicted on the national psyche by recent events. This chapter later emphasizes that the sub-genre, hillbilly horror, comes to encapsulate all the archaic disorder, medieval darkness, anti-classical savagery and pantheistic paganism of the American other and the terrorist threat alike while making amply apparent the simultaneously repressive and oppressive qualities of everyday civilised life.
This chapter reveals that this study is engaged with a number of debates drawn from horror film scholarship, trauma theory, post-colonial studies and cultural studies. This chapter also discusses that horror cinema's specific sub-genres, such as the onryou, the necrophiliac romance, the hillbilly horror adventure and others have been shown not only to allow for a mediated engagement with acts so disgusting or violent that their real-life realisation would be socially and psychologically unacceptable, but for a re-creation, re-visitation or re-conceptualisation of traumatic memories that lie buried deep within the national psyche; memories themselves so outrageous that their very actuality as past events appears a logical impossibility. Within a traumatised culture in which hegemonic conceptions of national identity are loudly contested by dissenting groups whose challenges are nonetheless marginalised or suppressed by their economic and political masters, horror cinema can be seen to fulfill an additional function. This chapter highlights how horror cinema's socially engaged deployment of humorous pastiche and affectionate parody might bring forth a new form of subjectivity from the trauma of the past, unbinding the wounds of the nation and in so doing offering them the opportunity to heal.
This chapter illustrates that drawing on the Japanese onryou or vengeful ghost narrative, Ringu, and later The Ring, was intimately concerned with traumatic dislocations to national self-image and the ways in which the media may promulgate ideologically dominant models of national identity for the internalisation of individuals who, as one has seen in the case of post-war Germany, nonetheless remain gravely wounded by the events of the historic past. Since the 1960s, Japanese horror cinema repeatedly had the female corpse return from the dead to demand retribution for the hitherto concealed wounds inflicted on the nation by unpunished historical crimes. This chapter also highlights the most commercially successful and culturally resonant, The Ring, Gore Verbinski's 2002 remake of Nakata Hideo's Ringu of 1998 (which is itself an adaptation of a Suzuki Koji novel of 1991), a film that has earned gross international revenues of over $229 million and became the seventh-highest grossing horror film in history. Furthermore, it explains the generic conventions of the onryou that may be seen to undermine the imperialistic agendas of both twentieth-century Japan and the twenty first-century United States.
This chapter opens with a discussion of John Winthrop, Governor of New England, who delivered a rousing sermon entitled A Model of Christian Charity. Winthrop outlined the hopes and fears of the community of men and women who had left Europe in search of religious freedom and warned of the dangers that imperiled the success of their mission to redeem the sins of the old world in the new. Winthrop warned people, that the Lord would surely break out in anger against them and stated that they would be ‘consumed out of the good land.’ The long-dead figure of John Winthrop is resurrected here for a number of reasons, primarily because close consideration of his words provides a salutary reminder that the foundational historical documents of the United States, as is the case with all nations, are continually open to ideological manipulation in the service of competing interest groups. It is nonetheless significant that by the 1970s new generation of activists, writers, artists and particularly film-makers looked to the nation's foundational mythology as a means of understanding why and how things had gone so terribly wrong in the present. Through a hugely creative deployment of the conventions of contagion horror, supernatural horror and body horror, the films of George A. Romero thus provide some of the most visually arresting political challenges to the low, dishonest decades from which they emerged.
This chapter draws heavily on the misadventures of the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, from Ridley Scott's film Hannibal. Reflecting the hunger of American audiences for the further misadventures of Hannibal Lecter, took this film to a record-breaking $58,000,000 on its opening weekend in the United States. Such massive public interest in Lecter had of course begun with his appearance in Thomas Harris's best-selling novels Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999). This chapter further illustrates that the iconic Lecter's true significance lay in the ways he allowed contemporary audiences to engage psychologically and socio-culturally with the historic traumas of the Reagan years while exposing the ideological mediation of that trauma by all aspects of the culture industry. The violent murderer has been a recurrent figure in the mass cultural imagination of the United States since the earliest days of the republic. He has come to the forefront of the popular imagination at times of political, social or economic dislocation; and his outrageous deeds and fantasies have allowed for a timely re-examination of one of the core paradoxes of American social life.
This chapter explores two recent works of experimental, historically grounded and hence political German films that effectively encapsulate the conceptual and critical agenda. They are Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2. These films are not only more thematically complex and technically sophisticated than is popularly supposed, but they also share a set of artistic and ideological concerns more usually associated with the canonic auteurs of the Young German Cinema and the New German Cinema of the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s. In both Nekromantik films then, Buttgereit was keen to expose the highly manipulative nature of the film medium—specifically in the second film's depiction of heterosexual pornography and the first's re-creation of the slasher horror genre. Buttgereit not only produced stylistically inventive and conceptually sophisticated works of modern horror cinema but also offered a new model of German subjectivity for a post-reunification age. It is a considerable achievement for one whose films have been widely banned, critically neglected and commonly viewed as low-budget shockers of little artistic and intellectual merit. Such attitudes, needless to say, are entirely predictable responses from a still wounded, still traumatised national culture unable yet to engage with Buttgereit's unflinchingly radical stance.