HORROR FILMMAKING IN THE AGE OF TERROR
12:23pm, April 24, 2008
For most Americans, the latest Age of Terror officially opened when the planes hit the towers on September 11, 2001…although the denizens of a dozen or more countries around the world all have good (meaning terrible) reasons for setting this date back by years or even decades.
Because film is our main medium for both reflecting and reinterpreting large-scale social, cultural, and political events, it came as no surprise to find in the weeks immediately following 9/11 that Hollywood was engaging in some strategic self-censorship (the establishment of the MPAA ratings system in 1968 was just an earlier and more dramatic example of this same strategy). Films like Big Trouble, Windtalkers, and Collatoral Damage, the latter with its predictably black-and-white take on the terrorist threat and America’s (or at least Schwarzenneger’s) ability to respond to it, were postponed for a time. And other ones, like Serendipity and Spider-Man, reshot or else digitally erased images of the Twin Towers from the final cut, out of an impulse not to interrupt their romanticized, comic-book fantasies with real-life tragedy. However, the absence of the World Trade Center in the New York City cinematic skyline proved more disturbing to American audiences than those films in which the Towers were left in for a posthumous cameo.
All of this is to beg the question: What is the relationship between horror in the world and horror in the movies? It’s interesting to note that perennially war-torn countries like Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and the former Yugoslavia, despite their long cinematic histories, have few if any horror films to their credit. It is tempting to conclude from this fact that the omnipresence of violence in everyday life makes the fictional portrayal of violence—horror films arguably occupying a position at the extreme end of violent genre filmmaking—both pointless and in very poor taste. Although there is certainly some truth to this argument, one shouldn’t overstate the conclusion, considering that a number of formerly or currently divided nations such as Korea, Germany, India, and the Czech Republic can all boast significant horror film traditions of their own.
It is tempting to assert that filmmaking in the age of terror is ultimately no different than filmmaking in any other age, if only because movies—horror movies included—inevitably offer a temporary escape from reality, even when they exploit real-life fears and anxieties. Documentaries are the closest cinema comes to capturing the real, but as we all know, documentaries themselves are often subjective, rhetorical, and misleading. The cutting edge of horror over the past ten years has been the introduction of variations on the mock, “snuff,” and pseudo-documentary (e.g., The Last Broadcast, Thesis, Man Bites Dog, The Blair Witch Project, The St. Francisville Experiment, Special Effects, and The Last Horror Movie), in which the aesthetics of the form serve to blur beyond recognition the boundaries between fact and fiction. 2007-2008 in particular has seen the horror mock-doc reach new heights, both commercially and creatively, what with the Spanish sensation [Rec] and its upcoming US remake Quarantine, the J.J. Abrams-produced Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead by George Romero, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, American Zombie, and Oren Peli’s Slamdance sensation Paranormal Activity. Cannibal Holocaust, we salute you.
In any case, one thing is certain: as human beings we always have and always will need fictional horror in our lives. Whether to distract us from the real thing or force us to contemplate it is for each of us to decide for ourselves.
|
You are browsing as a guest!
