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Get Out (2017) is a horror film that continues to build on the self awareness of horror tropes that we have seen in films such as Scream (1996). In addition to this self awareness is a distinct introduction of race and culture in the modern day as an essential element of the plot. This film could easily be seen as expansionary for many reasons, one of which being its expert use of understanding modern culture and issues to effectively communicate a particularly viewer-relevant scare by director Jordan Peele. Two scenes in particular deliver a visceral scare above the rest, both for differing reasons but upon a common thread. The first is among the final scenes in the film after Chris finds himself strangling Rose, in the wake of Georgina and Walter’s bodies. The arrival of the police cruiser kicks the viewer’s stomach into a deep hole. The arrival of a police car on someone in the act of killing someone with multiple bodies scattered around is of course a situation that does not favor Chris, however events in the modern day (and the past leading to this modern day) relating to police violence on communities of color in the US give this a particularly clear elevation of fear for how the police might respond to Chris that also shouts a clear commentary in its effect on the viewer. The second scene is earlier in the film when Chris tries to take a sneaky photograph of Logan, a strange behaving black man at the outdoor party. The combination of flash and camera shutter sound emitting from the phone a one, two punch dread in the viewer. It is here that Chris’ true vulnerability and aloneness is made clear for any who may have not felt it themselves by this point in the film. Chris stands in front of the crowd, once again the Black Spectacle after already having gone through the Microaggression Circuit from these ignorant party goers. Get Out captures a fear that understands the modern viewer, the zeitgeist, and challenges their perception of the present in a way distinct from that of other horror films of the same era.

Pictured: The roaming face of dread, hope, or death.

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Space About Empty Space

The creation of It Follows is a near twenty year leap chronologically from our previous film Scream, although it might be hard to tell from mise en scene alone. The visuals of the film harken back to early 80s suburbia, slasher stomping grounds of old, but its structure distinctly steps out of the horror film paradigm that created these tropes to begin with. What I believe sets this film apart from previous is the weaponization of empty space. Empty space is something employed to effect by other horror films, an empty space is an easy way to arouse expectation from a viewer for example, but it is not the focus and arguably not used to its fullest potential often. While other films are happy to have you knowing the killer is out there off screen, they mostly refuse to tell you what exactly the killer does with all this time to themselves. In the times he isn’t shown, Michael Myers could have been working extensively on an oil painting series about ducks in his apartment for all we know. Yes, Michael does want to kill you, and he will try! But even Michael says “I’ll come back tomorrow and try again, I’ve got other things to do now”. But It Follows gives the victims a simple rule: The killer is in the quiet (and slow) process of killing you 100% of the time, even when not seen. This film almost seems to make the argument that the violent traditional killer is a privilege, and that persistence is more dangerous than force. An interesting side-effect of this is that it causes viewers to focus on the empty. Many shots in the film are set up to emphasize negative space or to give the viewer so much more negative space in the average shot to juggle. Zoom ins and close shots are normally what emphasize what we as viewers should pay attention to, It Follows does utilize this during intimate scenes but inverts this convention much more often. The foundations of the slasher are still here, in the mise en scene, but many other aspects of this film can be seen as expansionary for the horror genre.

Pictured: Would the killer being pictured here make this more or less scary?

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The Self-Aware Scare?

Scream (1996) brings us into the 1990s, showing us a well developed commentary and parody on the state of the slasher film until that point. Scream does not hide its self-aware nature, yet at the same time it satisfies the long list of tropes that have been declared the structure of the slasher. As viewers our expectations are something to be carefully managed by the director (Wes Craven in this case). For a film that leans so openly on slasher structure we as viewers still feel great suspense. Wes Craven has in a way managed to talk about, critique, and at the same time employ the very same tropes without making the audience feel as if they could just depend on the comfortable slasher plot structure to ease their fears. Even with this awareness, handed to us by the film early on, we cannot use it to find relief from the fears for very long at a time. It highlights that understanding the “big picture”, eg. the character Tatum Riley seeming to serve as the designated sexually-open friend (the final girl’s contrast) also designated to die as an audience spectacle, does little to ease the fears of vision. An important point of comparison is the viewing of a passe slasher made in the years before. Scream served as an important break in a period of struggling and malaise in the horror genre. Scream might be thought of as the culmination of tropes honed years before, done skillfully and with a clever self-awareness. Vision topping logic and knowledge in the decisions of film characters, and the same concept affecting the reaction of the viewing audience is hardly new. However, Scream uses a mix of commentary, homage, and tropes (tropes confirmed and inverted) to make us feel fear regardless while pushing the entire genre out of its stagnancy.

Pictured: Can't help but imagine the Friends theme playing over this

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Halloween has a certain vision for its horror: a bad and stealthy character is let loose on innocent suburbia. The film overall is also conveyed with a distinctly youthful tone; many of the main characters are high school aged. Adults serve as authority figures separate from the world of the dating, peer pressure, and social whimsies enjoyed by those on screen most. Laurie Strode, our innocent protagonist, lives differently than her peers. She is shown knitting, babysitting, and wearing her leather shoes and white socks: she is the living image of innocence. Although she does try to stray outside of good behavior with help from her friends, she never quite goes completely off this “right” path. A key element in the film is the setup of the victim, there’s a particular focus on almost justifying the violence the victims endure through context and background. Nearly all sexual encounters are met afterwards with violence, or at least the hint of violence through surveillance or intimidation by Michael Myers. Michael Myers finds a great partner in crime in the suburbs. His stolen station wagon wafts among the suburbs no more suspicious than a Toyota RAV4 rolling through a Costco parking lot. He can place himself within yards of victims and remain nearly invisible to those who are not perceptive. In her lack of sexuality and hedonism Laurie is able to spot the suspicious patterns of surveillance by Michael. The suburbs being brought to horror cinema I believe was highly needed. Gothic tradition and monsters are a scary context we can’t live, but there is something poetic about the suburbs making taking lives away as easy as it is to live a life in the same place.

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Who is Dick Holloran?

The character Dick Holloway grabbed my attention almost immediately. In the plot he serves as a rare character: one with the most apparently clear understanding of The Shining ability. Yet he does not appear often, he is incredibly knowledgeable yet still a side character based on screen time. Little is said about Mr. Holloway, but much is said by him. I wanted to know more about this character, so I felt that analyzing Kubrick’s visuals of Holloran’s living space was a great place to start. The first impression I get is that he is a bachelor. In the scenes where he is using his red telephone we see a parlor with a wide spirit selection on the right side, a stereo system, and around the room contemporary, for the time, furniture. This is presented in opposition of the imaginary version of domestically conventional Mr. Holloway, seen making a phone call on the dated couch in the living room, with kids toys on the floor, and drawings taped on the fridge behind him. Moving to the scenes in his bedroom, where he watches television in the night, we are given a much better lit diorama of Mr. Holloran. The two large paintings are tasteful, but are a few levels more sensual than the art found in most family bedrooms. Here we also see a new side of Mr. Holloran: one that appreciates symmetry and evidences a sense of calculation. His bedroom is clean, colorful in a dark demure way, and a theme of symmetry is seen in his lamps, his dresser and his record boxes on the floor. There is a subtle sense of deliberate placement and control of the colors and elements he lives among. It seems here that Holloran is a bachelor sure, but his space does not seem to signal the malaise or egotistical tendencies that typically typify the older bachelor trope. The space that this character controls with such precision might lend to the confidence we have in him to bring control to an outside space, one that we consider at this point in the film, out of control.

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In The Era of #MeToo Should We Be Studying Rosemary's Baby?

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In The Era of #MeToo Should We Be Studying Rosemary's Baby?

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Dramatic irony is something used in horror films often. We often know more, or at least have a more complete picture, of the events in motion that characters in horrors are living with than any one single character. The anticipation we feel, waiting for the characters on screen to learn of things they haven’t quite pieced together yet, stokes our fears. Director and Screenwriter Roman Polanski creates a dramatic irony in the modern viewer throughout its viewing; A man with a well known past demarcated by predatory interactions with women and children creates a film that provides a well-assembled depiction of abusive environments perpetuated by patriarchal control. What does it mean when a film arrives, created in the real world by the same destructive forces used to evoke fear from its film audience? What is our responsibility?

Polanski’s personal behavior and accounts alone prove him to be at best cowardly malicious or socially stunted. In the podcast The Controversy by Megan Dooley a discussion on his past reveals that sexual behavior towards and grooming of minors was a common thing for Polanski. His own continued explanations for the events (that she was willing, that she consented to him) does not even begin to address the basic fact that an underaged person cannot provide sexual consent, in the proper sense, to an adult because they are children. The film Rosemary’s Baby is never far from controversy, but this movie ultimately edifies the viewer in many ways which I believe merits it worthy of continued study. The presentation of an abusive existence being not a series of abusive acts chained together, but instead being an environment of abuse: the idea that the very structure of one’s existence continually pulls your agency away from you at every turn, is one that strikes deep fear and rightly so. It is hard to walk away from this film without thinking of the themes brought up, of agency, trust, and choice, and what they really mean to you.

Pictured: Rosemary's Baby set photo from alternative universe. In this one the cat is baby.

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The Mad Photochemist

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With Peeping Tom (1960) we step away from the monsters and other-worldly invaders from titles like Frankenstein (1931) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The horror conveyed here is one sourced from psychology, a subject which still brings many mysteries, mixed together with elements and tropes we find in earlier horror cinema. Images of the “mad scientist” are not avoided, although in the case of Peeping Tom we have a laboratory with chemical and technological ambitions rather than the physiological. After viewing previous films there seems to be a pattern that emerges in their construction: with many decision points it seems an approach is taken to either (a) provide a trope, or to match an otherwise conventional horror outcome or (b) deviate from this trope to advance a feature of the plot that could scare audiences in a way they might not have been before. Peeping Tom has points where tropes are wheeled out, my favorite being the non-diegetic vaudeville-like piano theme that plays when Mark watches or creates his films, but overall advances a kind of fear that feels significantly more possible than monsters or aliens: a violent surveillance. The 1960s viewer was taken into the world of the mysterious alone actor, one whose interpersonal mannerisms could be seen in that one odd fellow you may know at work or in the neighborhood, etc. While the average awkward or otherwise non-social person is arguably up to no more nefarious activity in comparison to the more sociable person we see that this film fills this awkward man with a sadistic inclination, trained squarely at women. The psychological explanation for what Lewis has is defined in the film as scoptophilia, implied to have been brought on by similar treatment by his father towards him as a youth. This theme that errors in treatment, and imbalances of the mind plus time can bring about such cyclic and catastrophic behavior is powerful. The film raises many questions on gender, power, and vision.