SAW (LIONSGATE, 2004)
Graphic violence returned to the horror film with the onset of the Saw and Hostel series of films. In the gruesome but clever Saw, a psychopath subjects his victims to outlandish tortures and deaths, and continued to do so in the film’s many sequels. Frame enlargement.
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Aside from the obvious physical danger it typically poses to ordinary, normal characters in the films, the monster poses a larger and more profound threat to the classification systems that define reality and on which culture and society rest.
Whether a vampire, a mummy, a werewolf, or a vengeful psychopath, the monster represents a confusion—a violation—of social categories that specify boundaries between normal and abnormal, human and animal, living and dead. The monster typically occupies an uncertain middle ground between these distinctions, neither living nor dead, neither fully human nor fully an animal, abnormal but bearing disturbing traces of the human. Stories in the horror genre address the fragility of human identity by showing, through the monster, the loss, destruction, or violation of humanity.
The screen’s most famous monsters—Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s
Frankenstein’s monster, Lon Chaney Jr.’s wolfman, Freddie Kreuger, Jason Voorhees—
demonstrate that the monstrousness of the monster lies in its display of both human and inhuman characteristics. As such, the horror film questions the viewer’s most deeply cherished notions about what it means to be a human being. By centering on imaginary creatures who dwell in the margins of human life and consciousness, the horror film terrifies viewers by undermining their secure sense of where human identity lies in relation to the world of the dead, of animals, or of things.
DRACULA (UNIVERSAL, 1931); FRANKENSTEIN
(UNIVERSAL, 1931); THE WOLF MAN
(UNIVERSAL, 1941)
The greatest and most enduring monsters are
those that remain recognizably human while being
undeniably monstrous. This recognition that hu-
man identity and monstrosity are one is the genre’s
deepest secret and most profound source of terror.
Frame enlargements.
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The monsters in the Alien series, for example, are genre classics, genuinely creepy creatures, from which audiences recoil with primordial fear and disgust. The “face huggers,” blending arachnid and crustacean anatomy, seed their human hosts, and the baby aliens gestate inside the human victim, destroying their host as the human gives birth to the monster. The narrative arc of the first three films brings the creatures ever closer to Ripley, the series heroine, until it transpires that she, too, has been seeded and is no longer fully human. The third film ends with her destruction.
The appeal of such films shows that in cinema negative emotions—fear, anxiety, dread, experiences that in life are often quite unpleasant—can become sources of pleasure. The safety of the movie theatre or viewing room enables spectators vicariously to experience negative emotions without the real consequences that follow from such things in actual life. Staying within the imaginative domain of a fictional story enables viewers to experience these states as symbolic emotions rather than as real responses to actual, life-threatening situations. Many viewers, though, do not enjoy the experience of negative emotions in cinema, and for them the horror genre is one they avoid.
EVOLUTION OF THE HORROR FILM The evolution of the horror film demonstrates how genre conventions change. Old conventions become exhausted, and filmmakers search for new ones in their never-ending challenge to retain the interest of the audience. Horror films of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the monster using an actor in (often brilliant) makeup, whereas contemporary films often use computer-based visual effects to visualize the creatures. Moreover, horror films during their golden age tended to end on a very comforting note. The monster was destroyed, and the romantic couple reached safety unharmed. Horror often was left to the viewer’s imagination in contrast with the graphic gore of modern films, which use contemporary effects technology to visualize the elaborate violence that is now basic in the genre. (In this respect, The Blair Witch Project [1999], The Sixth Sense [1999], and The Others [2001], all of which work through suggestion rather than graphic violence, are a return to the golden age of horror.)
ALIEN 3 (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1992)
One of the monsters inspects Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and then gives her a tender caress because she is no longer fully human. Gestating inside her is a baby alien. The horror genre terrifies by violating the conditions that define human identity. Frame enlargement.
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By the 1970s and 1980s, in such films as Halloween and the never-ending Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series, the monster became inde-structible and undefeatable. These monsters—Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers of
the Halloween films, and the aliens in the Alien series—remain alive at the end of each episode, and viewers know they will come back again to haunt and terrify.
Contemporary horror films, therefore, can be more disturbing and unsettling than horror was in previous decades, when narrative conventions insisted that normality be restored and secure at film’s end. Perhaps because the modern viewer’s sense of what is normal is more precarious and more easily undermined, the destruction of order and security may strike contemporary audiences as a more authentic vision of life. The monsters today are everywhere, and they cannot be defeated, a perception that the narrative design of contemporary horror emphasizes.
Science Fiction
This genre and its close ally, the fantasy film, are the most popular of contemporary film genres, and arguably, they have made the strongest impact on popular culture by way of such series as the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings , and Matrix films.
The genre has its cinematic roots in the “trick” films that appeared with the birth of cinema. A Trip to the Moon (1902), The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1903), and many others used double exposures, miniature models, stop-action jump cuts, and in-camera mattes to simulate fantastic worlds, unexpected optical effects, and alterations of time and space. The Lost World (1925) used rear projection of animated dinosaur models blended with live actors matted in as foreground elements. Such early classics as Metropolis (1927) and Things to Come (1936) created visions of fantastic, often futuristic cities, establishing a tradition that continues today in Blade Runner (1982), Dark City (1998), The Fifth Element (1997), Sin City (2005), and the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films, where fabulously inventive cities are a key part of fantasy décor.
METROPOLIS (UFA, 1927)
Science fiction movies had been
made before Metropolis but never
in such grand, epic, and imagi-
native terms. This film, with its
futuristic city, has exerted a huge
influence on over a century of
science fiction and fantasy films.
In terms of this influence, one
could say that the science fic-
tion genre in cinema begins with
Metropolis . This scene shows the
master creation of the evil inven-
tor Rotwang, a humanoid robot.
Frame enlargement.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
THE TIME MACHINE (MGM, 1960)
Director–producer George Pal was a master of science fiction and fantasy in the 1950s.
His films were imaginative and literate and did not go overboard on special effects, using them instead to advance the story. The Time Machine is one of the best adaptations from sci-fi literature ever made. Pal’s other work includes When Worlds Collide (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953). Frame enlargement.
Low-budget Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon sci-fi serials were plentiful in the 1930s, but other genres, such as the W
estern and gangster film, were hugely popular.
Science fiction did not emerge as a major genre until the 1950s, when the Cold War emphasis on space exploration, coupled with anxieties about nuclear weapons, stimulated a tremendous amount of film production. Rocketship X-M (1950), Destination Moon (1950), and Forbidden Planet (1956) offered early depictions of space travel, whereas nuclear anxieties were displaced onto a gallery of mutant creatures spawned by radiation in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Them! (1954), Tarantula (1955), and others.
Twenty Million Miles to Earth (1957), Invaders from Mars (1953), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1957) expressed the Cold War paranoia of the period, with alien invaders standing in for the fear of communist attack. In Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), alien invaders destroy monuments and government buildings in Washington, D.C., in a manner that anticipates the action of Independence Day (1996).
The formative literature of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells influenced a number
of distinguished adaptations in this period: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Time Machine (1960), and Mysterious Island (1961).
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Time Machine are especially distinguished, with the former a lavish Technicolor Disney extravaganza and the latter a thoughtful, careful adaptation of Wells’ novel with outstanding special effects by George Pal. Compare it with the sorry remake (2002), which turned Wells’
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
speculative novel into action adventure. (Wells’ The Time Machine has inspired many time-travel films over the years, some of which are more fantasy than science fiction—
Time After Time (1979), The Final Countdown (1980), Somewhere in Time (1980), Time Bandits (1981), and 12 Monkeys (1995).
For the most part, science fiction diminished in the 1960s as a popular genre, although that decade saw one of its masterworks, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), as well as Planet of the Apes (1968), the first and best of a series.
Kubrick’s film is a deliberately mysterious, perplexing meditation on humankind’s encounter with alien intelligence, and it departs from film conventions by showing space as a silent void (no space ships here sounding like souped-up race cars). With its mystical visions of the cosmos, 2001 connects with the intellectual focus of much science fiction literature, which the Star Wars series discarded when it seized on the Buck Rogers–Flash Gordon serials as its model. But it was Star Wars in 1977 that revived the genre’s vitality. The Star Wars saga (1977–2005) reawakened popular interest in science fiction, and the genre has remained extraordinarily popular ever since.
During the era spawned by Star Wars , the long-running Star Trek series (1979, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2009) helped to keep alive the intellectual elements of the science fiction enterprise. But unlike the low-tech television series on which the movies were based, the films offered state-of-the-art visual effects, as did other high-profile productions, such as the Jurassic Park series (1993, 1997, 2001). In addition to Star Trek , other distinguished films that have used the genre to explore ideas, in contrast to action adventure, include Brazil (1985), Gattaca (1997), and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Although science fiction lends itself to utopian visions of the future, in practice, very few films fall into this category. Many take a darker outlook; in the process, they reflect back to us our anxieties and fears about the present. Even though the Star Wars saga ends (in Return of the Jedi , 1983) in a utopian world, the series climaxes (in terms of the production sequence of the films) with Revenge of the Sith (2005), in which Anakin Skywalker joins the dark side and becomes Darth Vader.
In this respect, science fiction gives filmmakers a powerful means for exploring anxieties about where our world is heading, and many films take a grim and pessimistic view, seeing a decaying environment, antidemocratic governments, and ruthless corporations controlling the world— Escape from New York (1981), Robocop (1987), Blade Runner (1982), the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2004), the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003), Starship Troopers (1997), and Minority Report (2001). I, Robot (2004) offers reflections on the erosion of civil liberties and threats to democracy in the United States following 9/11. Even a comic film such as Men in Black (1997) finds the earth continuously poised on the edge of annihilation.
Epic struggles with titanic evil inform the Star Wars films, and their success influenced similar depictions in the Matrix and Lord of the Rings series. The latter series, though, belongs to fantasy and locates its battles between good and evil in an ancient mythic world. As such, it draws from a somewhat different set of influences. These include the battle epics of directors Akira Kurosawa ( Seven Samurai , 1954) and Sergei Eisenstein ( Alexander Nevsky , 1936), as well as earlier epics of ancient world mythology (Fritz Lang’s Siegfried , 1924, and Kriemhild’s Revenge , 1924).
The Lord of the Rings films are also deeply influenced by the fantasy creatures designed by effects wizard Ray Harryhausen in ancient-world pictures such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and One Million Years B.C. (1967).
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2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (MGM, 1968)
Whereas Metropolis is the towering classic of the silent period, 2001 is the genre’s greatest masterpiece of the sound era. Stanley Kubrick’s mystical and spectacular epic of human discovery follows the intellectual tradition established in sci-fi literature. Frame enlargement.
DISTRICT 9 (TRISTAR, 2009)
Contemporary science fiction often projects visions of the future or of alternative worlds based on speculations about contemporary problems and fears. District 9 uses the era of racial segregation and oppression in South Africa, known as “apartheid,” to depict a world in which a race of aliens trapped on Earth is confined to slums and detention camps and kept under military surveillance. The story situation also resonates with a post-9/11
world. Dramatizing contemporary problems in disguise enables science fiction to remain relevant to the lives of its viewers. Frame enlargement.
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The Nature of Narrative in Film
As The Lord of the Rings series premiered over a span of three years, many people remarked that the creative torch in science fiction/fantasy seemed to have been passed from George Lucas (and Star Wars ) to Peter Jackson (and Lord of the Rings ).
Like so much of science fiction, though, the Jackson films envision a world in crisis while enabling the filmmakers to use cinema effects with imaginative delight. Here lies the essential appeal of the science fiction genre—giving form to contemporary doubt while conjuring magic tricks unlike any seen before.
THE WAR FILM
With classics such as The Big Parade (1925) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), the war film extends back to the silent and early sound eras. The Birth of a Nation (1915) has a Civil War sequence of startling realism. But it was the World War II era and its immediate aftermath that saw the Hollywood studios produce this genre in its greatest numbers. Hollywood joined the war effort, and in such pictures as Objective, Burma! (1945), Flying Tigers (1942), They Were Expendable (1945), and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), American film showed the home audience why the war had been fought and celebrated the patriotism and sacrifice of its soldiers.
But World War II was the last war about which America held a clear consensus of opinion, and the films about subsequent wars have been much more ambivalent and critical. Korea in The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) and Pork Chop Hill (1959), Vietnam in Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1986), the Persian Gulf War in Three Kings (1999), and the Iraq War in The Hurt Locker (2008) are depicted as conflicts without a clear rationale or moral foundation.
As these examples suggest, narrative in the war film is often reflective of the political and social context that surrounds a given war. When that context is gene
rally free of controversy, as in World War II, the celebration of heroism in a picture such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) is much easier to achieve.
SANDS OF IWO JIMA
(REPUBLIC, 1949)
Hollywood’s films about World
War II were part of the war ef-
fort and were meant to instill
patriotic feelings in their viewers.
John Wayne appeared in many of
these films as a hero engaged in
a good fight about which neither
he, nor the viewers, had doubts.
No war since has been shown by
American film in so untroubled a
fashion. Frame enlargement.
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THE HURT LOCKER (VOLTAGE PICTURES, 2008)
Recent wars have lacked the moral and political clarity that surrounded World War II, and the genre has reflected this with more ambiguous or critical portraits of modern war. The Iraq War that followed 9/11, for example, has been depicted in many films as an ill-considered campaign lacking clear objectives. The Hurt Locker takes a close-in view, portraying the experiences of a bomb demolition expert (Jeremy Renner, right) whose addiction to the adrenaline rush of combat alienates him from the other soliders in his squad. Frame enlargement.
By contrast, it has proven much harder to portray Korea or Vietnam or the Iraq War on film with the moral clarity and heroism of Hollywood’s World War II films. In fact, Hollywood avoided making films about Vietnam until the late 1970s and 1980s, and contemporary depictions of the Iraq War often are bleak and without heroic affirmation.
War films tend to come in three formats. Battle epics provide a large-scale over-view of the strategies and objectives that are involved in major military confrontations. The story in these films moves from high-level military decision-making to front-line action, providing a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding battle. The Longest Day (1962), In Harm’s Way (1965), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1968), and Pearl Harbor (2001) exemplify this format, which is closely associated with World War II. But it is also a format that lends itself very well to depictions of the ancient world, as in Alexander (2004), Troy (2004), and Spartacus (1960).
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