NB. Expect this post to be edited to death…
After saying just the other week to Jennimi (who has retired from blogging for the time being) that I had also largely given up - mainly because whatever I write seems to consist of a rant - I present… another rant.
Sorry.
But recently, it seems that every second novel I pick up is awful, and every second movie is dire. In particular: two (2) nihilistic and daft pieces of horror. Let’s look at the apparently bestselling book ‘The Ruins’, and the movie version of ‘The Mist’.
The first of these I picked up in Canada on the way to Pittsburgh a fortnight ago. According to the cover, it’s a compulsively readable novel that’s virtually impossible to put down once you start it. I’m going to have to disagree with that. After fifty pages, I put it down and went swimming. Got through the rest during various connecting flights the following day. The guy sitting next to me on one plane looked at the book and asked, “Hey, how is that book? I got it a month ago, I’m on page twenty.’
I’d just finally reached the last page - yielding, as one might say, the final tortured spark of attention - and I closed the book, folded it into the seat pocket and said, ‘I wouldn’t recommend page twenty-one.’ I don’t, by the way, for several reasons, and neither do a whole load of other people. If you want to see social conflict in action, take a look at Amazon scores for this book:
5 star: 20% (194)
4 star: 16% (158)
3 star: 14% (136)
2 star: 17% (172)
1 star: 31% (297)
The plot is pretty simple. A bunch of cardboard cut-out characters (and a German named Mathias, which is somewhat inexplicable given that Germans spell the name with two t’s) head off into the jungle in search of Mathias’ brother, accidentally cross the wrong boundary and end up stuck on a hill full of lush greenery which - spoiler warning - is both carnivorous and hungry. The vines will, eventually, eat the lot of them. In some cases it will also be responsible for their deaths, although according to the rules of all disaster stories since ‘Lord of the Flies’, the characters are insanely neurotic and dangerous to themselves and each other to the extent that the vine has pretty much nothing to do but sit back and make noises like a mobile telephone - I kid you not, the plant is a ventriloquist. It never actually sings any of the ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, but now that you mention it this is probably a youtube fan movie just waiting to happen. Anyway, the major points here are that the characters are unlikeable and virtually without personality, and they all die messily.
The Mist gets slightly less polarised ratings, but all the same, you can see quite a spread of opinion in there:
5 star: 34% (95)
4 star: 24% (68)
3 star: 16% (46)
2 star: 11% (32)
1 star: 12% (35)
Superficially, the two stories share many similarities. True, in the one case the kids come to the disaster. In the case of The Mist, the characters just happen to be visiting the same supermarket at the time that the Evil ExtraDimensional Mist comes to call, so their role in establishing the situation is more passive - except it isn’t, because as is pointed out, it’s really the fault of the Army and their bosses for Playing Silly Buggers With What Man Ought Not To Wot Of. Anyway, the mist contains a very large number of evil horror/fantasy-movie cliches: the tentacles you see in Tremors before you discover that they actually belong to a carnivorous earthworm; the gigantic spiders that spawn their unholy children in the unwilling bodies of their victims (a la digger wasp, Van Vogt’s Discord in Scarlet, the Aliens series, etc); massive great insects and pterodactyls, of which there is no shortage in the literature. People who go outside end up dead. Those who stay inside end up committing suicide, converting to religious extremism and sacrificing a soldier in order to appease the big, evil bugs. Also, and this is where the story really diverges from the Stephen King novella on which this is based, they all die. Except for the one guy, who after kindly euthanising the leftovers of his family and friends, runs out of bullets and is rescued despite his own best efforts. In the original - as is almost always the case with Stephen King - the novella ends by injecting a note of hope.
IFC film news calls The Ruins “the extreme end of that growing “Hostel”/”Turistas” subgenre of films embodying America’s suspicions that everyone else in the world would like to violently kill us — in this case, even the local plant life.” In the case of The Mist, of course, it’s the fauna rather than the flora, but as one reviewer on IMDB commented, doesn’t the dimension that these creatures came from have any other inhabitants, such as fluffy extraterrestrial bunnies or (heavens) plants? And in the spirit of Paul Leggett, who states that “the horror film gives us an insight into the spiritual condition of our culture. This has been true for almost a century. The nature and tone of horror films reveal the outlook and fears of the culture”, one might wonder precisely what the heck the apparent attraction to 70s-esque paranoid horror means about us.
Why are commenters on Amazon and IMDB so hostile to critics, so protective of these works? They certainly appear to be. I plan to analyse the comments at some point to get a feel for how much the actual frequencies of rebuttals in comments vary from other subgenres or occurrences, but qualitatively it looks like it happens a lot. Is this a ‘you love it or hate it’ effect, and if so, what are those who hate this particular subgenre missing? What is the meme hook that provides emotional susceptibility to slasher movies in which everybody dies - for no good reason?
I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of this paper yet, but Daniel Shaw apparently separated horror into the following genres in ‘Power, Horror, and Ambivalence’: 1, a sort of ‘power-driven’ horror, in which the audience derives pleasure from the sheer power and control of the monster or serial killer, and 2, ‘nihilistic horror’, in which the monster or serial killer seems to be out of control, and therefore powerless. He writes:
‘deeply disturbing and hence not as pleasurable as the bulk of horror films we have been discussing, works of nihilistic horror provide the negative to the positive image of monsters and serial killers that I have been contending comes from their power. Our response to nihilistic horror is different precisely because it denies us the pleasure of identifying with truly powerful (human) protagonists and superhuman antagonists. Like a deer caught in the headlights on a pitch black night, we quiver at the prospect of such an absurd and meaningless fate’
I’m not sure the fate is what gets me. Death by Hollywood cliche is not my worst nightmare. Rather, what concerns me is the idea that for some reason, at least enough people to generate those Amazon comments not only find something extremely attractive in the topic, but are driven to haunt web spaces related to these media in order to defend them in public. To misquote Tori Amos, sometimes I think the national psyche just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie.
