Back in the fall of 1999 I was feeling inspired by an unexpectedly good summer for horror movies. Back then Scream was still pretty much the be-all and end-all of contemporary horror. I saw that movie in a drive-in and was thoroughly entertained, but I could have told you even then that basing a couple dozen horror movies on its reference-heavy self-reflexivity was a great big dead end for the genre. By the summer of ’99, enough I Still Know the Urban Legend of How You Screamed About Your Disturbing Behavior flicks had filtered down the pike that I was pretty much ready to give the genre up for dead. Then all of a sudden The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense and Eyes Wide Shut came along–three horror movies (yes, three; EWS is a horror movie that uses sex instead of violence, and yeah, I’ll probably have to elaborate on that sometime this month) that were both good and frightening enough to enter the canon and had nothing to do with either the current crop of slasher flicks or its progenitors. What, exactly, were these movies doing?
I was disappointed to discover that film studies (of which I was a student at the time) had little to offer me by way of an explanation. Indeed, almost all of the films and images I’d found truly horrifying in my years as a horror buff were glossed over by the film studies establishment in favor of psychoanalytic analyses of gender and audience-identification issues–worthwhile avenues of exploration, but by no means should they be the only ones available.
I decided to write a very practical Senior Essay–a thesis exploring what I thought was the definitive image of horror in most all of the films I’d actually found effective as horror. I called it “the monumental horror-image”–like a monument, it stands in testament to the overturning of the natural order to which horror forces us to bear witness.
I thought it’d be a great way to get Where the Monsters Go: Horror Month at ADDTF going to make The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film available for download. Click here to download the 42-page essay as a PDF. (If PDFs pose a problem for you, you can click here to read the first two sections of the thesis in HTML.) I promise you that there’s not a lot of jargon in there, so even if it’s been a while since you’ve been in a goofy liberal arts program (hey, it’s been a little while for me, now, too), you should still be able to follow what the hell I’m talking about. This was the best-received piece of writing I’ve ever done (up until that Batman piece, of course)–it won an award for Best Senior Essay in the Film Studies Program at school, and no less a personage than Clive Barker called it “so fucking smart.” Also, isn’t it just kinda funny that I got to do a senior thesis that included close readings of movies like The Wicker Man, The Shining and The Exorcist?
So yeah, here it is. It spells out pretty clearly where I’m coming from in my approach to horror, and though it’s sort of cobbled together due to its very practical concern of answering the question I wanted answered, I think its Frankensteinian construction is somehow appropriate. I hope you dig it.
And if nothing else, the volume of Diet Coke I drank during its production–now that’s truly horrifying.