Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was pushed out of the top box office slot this week by The Fog, a remake of the 1980 John Carpenter film of the same title. Rotten Tomatoes shows that 95% of critics give a positive rating to the former, 3% to the latter –maybe the most dramatic shift in the tomatometer’s relatively brief history. Both are horror films, just in time for Halloween. The Wallace and Gromit movie isn’t really a horror film, of course, more of a light-hearted spoof of one, but horror fans will attest that the genre, if that’s what it is, more often than not involves a little self-mockery and a wink at the audience. Arguably the best horror films of the last twenty years or so have been either self-referential (Wes Craven’s Scream series), mixed with another genre (Silence of the Lambs, a crime/suspense film; Alien, benefiting from science fiction art decoration; The Sixth Sense, almost a horror version of an after-school special: sensitive boy learns to cope with divorce), or openly and deliberately comical in their intensity, as in The Evil Dead films, the second of which is the source of my title. For those who don’t know the movie, one film student site provides a nice summary of the relevant scene:
Horror can be a hard genre to like, one that only periodically crosses over into the mainstream. Surely horror films make up more than their fair share of all the films ever made that are lacking in what people used to call “redeeming" qualities. When a horror movie is bad, it’s very bad (unless it’s very good), but when it’s good it’s as if the medium of film and the art of cinema were invented for no other purpose.
Most of the milestones of the genre have been remade or prequelled in the past 5 years: The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead (released the same year as Shaun of the Dead). . . As far as I know, most of the recent remakes have been bad, and not in a good way. But to say that remakes are generally bad misses the point: horror movies are always remakes or sequels. They cross genres to produce monstrous hybrids, return to the scenes of crimes over and over again. They are compelled to repeat, to repeat compulsively, to stab a little more than is really necessary, to add another “surprise” recovery by the killer, to give a monster a son, or a bride, or a long-lost cousin from space, or the future, or the past --it really doesn’t matter. Horror keeps trying.
Like comedy, frights are mostly about timing: not just the timing within the film, but the timing of the film. All appearances to the contrary, horror films are profoundly historical. The ones that become classics do so not because they transcend their eras, but because they are able to horrify as period pieces. This is why even though sequels are generally inferior to originals, they are still usually better than remakes. Unlike in popular music, where I would say that the cover is generally stronger than the second-rate knock-off, with the horror film you are often better off going with the knock-off: it is a better imitation precisely because it is a superficial one.
But horror films are historical in any number of senses. They give a telling account of the technical history of the medium and of the language of film. They offer one kind of record of the limits of public taste and, yes, of collective fears, although generally in ways that are much more oblique –-not to say subtle-- than is usually recognized. Horror films also tend, I think, to be very much tied to the history of particular lives and to succeed or fail accordingly. They are neither for children nor for adults. They are initially approached with a sense of discovery and of total wonder, as if they provided a way to look behind the door, into the closet, and under the bed of every adult who ever lived or ever will. They are of course for adolescents and of course mostly for boys, which is why they, as we like to say, get old. As Halloween approaches I find myself a little sad, but not horrified, that I just can’t enjoy them like I used to. Losing Innocence isn’t so bad; it can be harder to lose Experience.
For your encore, please consider this question: why did zombies move from being slow but reasonably steady pursuers of human flesh--so that at least you had a chance of outrunning them--to being the speedy creatures they are in horror films of late?
If I were a genius I would spend three years developing this idea and write a book, but here's my impromptu answer: old zombies were photographs turning into cinema or maybe television; new zombies are wifi digital video.
I browse printculture a couple of times a week and as a fan and student of the horror film I can't resist the temptation to post on this topic. I think a partial answer to the question of why accelerated zombies now can be found in the montage sequences that open both “28 Days Later” and the “Dawn of the Dead” remake. I believe that the “Dawn” montage begins with an image of several hundred Muslims kneeling for prayer. The “28 Days” one alternates between footage of, among other things, Middle-Eastern men abusing a hanged corpse with images of uniformed police beating protesters reminiscent of pictures from anti-globalization rallies. Both of these films replace yesterday's ponderous zombies, in which some people detect a satirical jab at mindless consumerism, with the speedy zombie whose implacable rage is linked to the violence inherent in our contemporary global economy, including both the violence needed to sustain it, police clad in riot gear, and the violence it allegedly provokes, Islamic Fundamentalism. In either case, the zombie, whether swift or slow, is connected to the changing face of Capitalism. This correlation seems especially appropriate, since, as a figure, the zombie finds its origins in the inhuman labor conditions of Caribbean sugar plantations.
What a great pair of answers; Benjamin meets Adorno, and not for the last time!
Let me follow up on Michael's by suggesting that if the slow zombie figures the consumer, and the fast zombie the violence of capital flows (in other words, stupid vs. smart), the position of the spectator changes radically, since in the former instance s/he's confronted with a violence that could potentially be in the self (I'm afraid of the zombie, because I'm afraid I am or will become him) to a violence that comes to the self and invades it from the outside (I'm afraid of the zombie not because I am the zombie but because zombieness might infect me).
My use of “infect” reminds me that the current vector for zombiness is viral at least in some new cases (Resident Evil for instance) whereas the earlier model was fetishistic/“primitive” (you become a zombie by eating human flesh).
Michael,
Thanks for the comment. My first instinct is not to disagree with you at all, but to find some way of having zombie=medium and zombie=capital be two ways of saying the same thing. Just as important, the element of racial paranoia. There must be an interesting mummy-Egyptian-Arab angle here, but that would require a little research.
E Hayot's point about the viral is, alas, true as well, but again I think there is a way to think about the “viral” as a cultural category that reflects as much the flows of capital and the effects of media as it does AIDS or SARS or avian bird flu.
Now I really do feel like writing a zombie book (pass along any recommendations you have), but the last thing I'll add is that origins would probably be important here. What, in a particular context, caused the existence of the zombies, i.e. what blend of nature, culture, religion, etc. is violated and in what way.
I think you're right. There is a way to view zombie=medium and zombie=capital as the same thing. In order to bridge the gap between the two, we can invoke another figure drawn from sci-fi/ horror that shares many characteristics with our discussion of slow and fast zombies: the raptors from “Jurassic Park.” I recall reading an essay written by W.J.T. Mitchell whose title specifically invokes Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” At one point, Mitchell likens the raptor to the modern corporation for its agility and intelligence and distinguishes it from corporate dinosaurs such as GM. Elsewhere he draws his readers' attention to a scene in which the cloned dinosaurs move through a control room where their genetic code is projected onto them. We might even look to the public statements of companies like Nike who claim that manufacturing substantial “things” is so 20th century and that they simply traffic in images, a whole host of connotations that they attach to the swoosh.
Regarding the viral we again have recourse to horror movies. Viruses themselves resemble zombies in that they transgress boundaries between life and death. While teaching a film class last year, I was lucky enough to find an issue of Scientific American that, on its front cover, posed a question one would expect to find in a horror movie: “Are Viruses Alive?” Also, as we know, “virus” is the metaphor we use to describe information that infects our computers, thereby blurring the boundaries between the mechanical and the biological, making these ambiguous things very uncanny indeed. The horror movie to watch here is “The Ring” where a tape reproduces for reproduction's sake. It has no grand narrative, the return of the repressed for instance, to justify its activity. The tape's viral nature is explicit in Koji Suzuki's novel where a character actually refers to the tape as a virus. I haven't read the sequel to the novel, but in leafing through the book, I've noticed that it contains photographs of genes and DNA diagrams.
Zombies. On the most literal level, they blur distinctions between biological life and death. In the context of Caribbean slavery, however, they also trouble categories of civil, political and legal life and death. If slaves are property they can't be human and therefore can't be alive so far as the law is concerned. They are in fact flesh and blood automatons. Hence, the figure of the zombie, a grotesque, though just barely, rendering of someone robbed of agency and inhabiting the betwixt and between area that separates the legally living from the legally dead. More uncanniness.
Enjoying the conversation immensely.
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