Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

Transnationalism & Genre Hybridity

IN NEW BRITISH HORROR CINEMA

HORROR STUDIES

Series Editor

Xavier Aldana Reyes, Manchester Metropolitan University

Editorial Board

Stacey Abbott, Roehampton University

Linnie Blake, Manchester Metropolitan University

Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas

Fred Botting, Kingston University

Steven Bruhm, Western University

Steffen Hantke, Sogang University

Joan Hawkins, Indiana University

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne

Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin

Johnny Walker, Northumbria University

Preface

Horror Studies is the first book series exclusively dedicated to the study of the genre in its various manifestations – from fiction to cinema and television, magazines to comics, and extending to other forms of narrative texts such as video games and music. Horror Studies aims to raise the profile of Horror and to further its academic institutionalisation by providing a publishing home for cutting-edge research. As an exciting new venture within the established Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism programme, Horror Studies will expand the field in innovative and student-friendly ways.

Transnationalism & Genre Hybridity

IN NEW BRITISH HORROR CINEMA

LINDSEY DECKER

© Lindsey Decker, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78683-698-4

eISBN: 978-1-78683-700-4

The rights of Lindsey Decker to be identified as author of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover images used under licence from Shutterstock.com, artists NickJulia and mistery

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Frights, Film Culture and Genre Hybrids

Examining Transnational Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

1. The ‘Bastard Child of Mainstream Cinema’

Middlebrow British Film Culture, Transnationalism and Horror

2. The Golden Age of British Cinema is Undead

British Zombies and the Social Realist Impulse

3. Hybrid Hoodie Horrors

Genre Localisation and Britain’s Moral Panic

4. ‘A Famous Corpse’

Resurrecting Hammer’s Transnational Appeal

Conclusion: British Horror’s Perpetually ‘Dying Light’

Notes

References

Filmography

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK IS THE culmination of a series of unlikely events, and I’m grateful to everyone who has supported me along the way. In particular, thank you to Roger Hallas for working with me to transform the seed of an idea about genre hybridity in British horror films into the full-length study from which this book stems. Truly, I could not have asked for a better mentor. I would like to thank Steven Cohan and Kendall Phillips for their expertise, feedback and support, as well as Linnie Blake and Chris Hanson for their valuable comments on the project in its earlier stages.

Thank you to Sarah Lewis, the head of commissioning at the University of Wales Press, for her interest in my project and for helping to shepherd the project through the publication process. Thank you to the reviewers for their time and feedback.

I would like to thank my colleagues at Boston University’s Department of Film & Television for their interest in and support for this book.

Thanks to all of the various folks who have given me feedback on various pieces of this project at conferences, particularly Johnny Walker, Ann Davies, Rachel Fabian, Justin Smith, Dana Och and Geneveive Newman.

I would be remiss if I did not thank Dustin Potter, Staci Stutsman, Melissa Welshans, Peter Katz and Sarah Barkin for listening to me as I worked through ideas at various stages in this project.

And finally, thank you to my students – I try to touch on the concept of transnational genre hybridity in nearly every course I teach, and I have really enjoyed our conversations about it across the years.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. The cover of the October 2002 issue of Sight & Sound.

Figure 2. Shots from Pure Rage (top to bottom: talking-head interview, lap dissolve, shot from 28 Days Later).

Figure 3. Top, Attack the Block, Moses, played by John Boyega, being pursued by the flattened, undifferentiated mob of aliens. Bottom, Assault on Precinct 13, the gang members emerge from the shadows in the mid-ground in the police station parking lot.

Figure 4. Top, Jennet’s smoky black ghost hand on Kipps’s left shoulder. Bottom, the smoke-like ghost of Kayako hovering over Sachie.

Figure 5. Top, Nathaniel in The Woman in Black. Bottom, Toshio in Ju-on: The Grudge.

Figure 6. The cover of the November 2012 issue of Sight & Sound.

Figure 7. Whitehead’s body is turned into itself.

Figure 8. From left to right, top to bottom, making an eye in Under the Skin.

Introduction: Frights, Film Culture and Genre Hybrids

Examining Transnational Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

Although the increased visibility of British horror cinema in the new millennium has made it difficult to ignore, it is significant that the films with the greatest critical and cultural impact have been those with the highest levels of generic impurity. Whilst the similarly Romero-influenced Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later benefited from their borrowings from other genres – respectively, comedy and post-apocalyptic science fiction – the British horror film still lacks critical respectability. A slightly different fate has befallen films that can be more closely identified with the science fiction genre. Although fewer in number, these have enjoyed greater prestige. (James Leggott, from his Contemporary British Cinema: From Heritage to Horror¹)

THE ABOVE QUOTATION from British cinema scholar James Leggott’s excellent Contemporary British Cinema primer, published in 2008, crystallises the key concerns of this project by bringing together new British horror cinema of the 2000s, genre hybridity, transnationality and middlebrow British film culture. Leggott cites the fact that the most critically significant British horror films of the first decade of the 2000s were genre hybrids – characterised by, as he puts it, ‘generic impurity’. He casts this hybridity, or ‘impurity’, as negative. It likely helped Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) but not enough to make them as prestigious as more straightforward genre films that fit more solidly within a single genre like science fiction. More importantly, this excerpt positions Shaun and 28 Days Later as transnational hybrids, primarily influenced by American director George Romero’s zombie films but made better by their fusion with genres Leggott has earlier framed as explicitly British. However, this recourse to home-grown genres could not save these Americanised British horror films – indeed, the transnationality of the genre hybridity seems to be part of what keeps the films from critical respectability, in opposition to films seen as more uncomplicatedly British. But this respectability is being adjudicated and found wanting within the context of a particular strand of British film culture, one which dominates many discussions of British film, academic and otherwise, and has influenced Leggott’s writing here: middlebrow British film culture.

In this book, I theorise the ways that transnational genre hybridity can function in a film through formal elements and genre tropes. I use the 2000s British horror resurgence as a vital case study through which to investigate this phenomenon. The term ‘resurgence’ has been used fairly widely in popular and academic publications to discuss the British horror boom of the 2000s. While Geoffrey Macnab may have been the first to mention the ‘UK horror picture’ and its ‘remarkable resurgence’, it appears that Anne Billson’s review of David Pirie’s A New Heritage of Horror was the first instance of the full phrase ‘British horror resurgence’.² In part, this period of British horror cinema presents such a compelling site because of middlebrow British film culture and its relationship with both the horror genre and the British film industry. The British film-makers whose work I examine in this book used transnational genre hybridity in several key ways within a set of prestigious and successful new British horror films. This allowed these film-makers a means to respond to discourses circulating about the industry and genre within middlebrow British film culture. In doing so, transnational genre hybridity became a tool for cultural engagement as well as cultural legitimation. Film-makers could respond to a key strand of film culture that was discussing and shaping their work, which further allowed them to influence several of the discourses about British horror circulating within that film culture.

Films that engage in transnational genre hybridity draw on formal and narrative tropes from specific genres associated with foreign national cinemas and combine them with tropes from long-standing and emergent genres from their own national cinema. This transnational genre hybridity is not simply postmodern intertextuality but a deliberate strategy through which to engage with the film’s own national cinema and film culture, as well as discourses circulating about both the national and transnational within that industry and culture. This combination creates genre hybridity that also marks out that film as firmly transnational. Consequently, a study of transnational genre hybridity cannot only be a textual study of formal and narrative generic elements within a film or set of films – it cannot only be an elaboration of a film’s intertextuality. It must also be a study of the film’s paratexts, including promotional and supplemental materials like trailers, posters, behind-the-scenes DVD featurettes and press interviews from directors, the cast and crew members. Because transnational genre hybridity engages with discourses circulating within associated national film cultures, a study of the phenomenon must also be a study of film culture and the relevant discourses within that culture. This hybrid methodology, combining more traditional textual analysis of films with the study of paratexts and film cultures, allows for more nuanced readings of films as texts and illuminates how these uses of transnational genre hybridity allow films to engage with specific film cultures and to what ends.

‘Transnational’ has come to mean many things, but I use it here descriptively to refer to how a film’s genre hybridity positions it with regard to nation. In the twenty or so years since it emerged, transnational cinema studies has provided a much needed corrective to what Andrew Higson dubbed ‘the limiting imagination of national cinema’.³ Much film studies scholarship in this area has productively focused on the transnationalism of remakes, co-production, distribution, exhibition, reception and stardom; brought attention to postcolonial, diasporic and non-Western cinemas; and examined films that narrativise cultural and geographical border crossings.⁴ At the same time, while an entire journal is dedicated to transnational media, Transnational Screens (published by Routledge, 2010–present), academics are still debating the meaning and utility of the term. This is most notable in the work of scholars like Deborah Shaw, Will Higbee, Song Hwee Lim, Mette Hjort, and Iain Robert Smith and Austin Fisher.⁵ However, despite the field having blossomed and expanded to cover an impressive number of cinemas and methodologies, the relationship between transnationalism and genre has gone relatively unexamined. Shaw comes closest to my concerns when discussing ‘transnational modes of narration’ in terms of films following certain film language conventions, like those of art cinema, and ‘transnational critical approaches and transnational influences’, including the intertextuality made possible in a global film industry.⁶ With the term transnational genre hybridity, I bring together these ideas in a new way to think through the ways that strategically using transnational intertextuality and shared film language conventions associated with different cinemas allow film-makers to comment upon the relationship between their national industry and other national or regional cinemas, or even global cinema.

Breaking the word transnational into its component parts, trans-and national, allows some further specificity here. ‘Transnational’, as a polysemic term, has numerous potential meanings, in part because of the different ways that the prefix trans- can signify: through or situated across, so as to thoroughly change or transfer and on the other side of or beyond. Focusing on the different meanings of this prefix, then, ‘transnational’ can be used to describe a film, or set of films, situated across national cinemas. These films can draw on the tropes, genres or national concerns of multiple national cinemas; they may address the relationship between particular national cinemas, whether to emphasise differences or break down borders. ‘Transnational’ can also designate a film that thoroughly changes some aspect of nationality. For example, a film may engage in localisation by taking a stylistic device or genre associated with a foreign national cinema and changing it to better fit pre-existing national film traditions or with contemporary cultural concerns. A film could also take up and change a pre-existing national genre, or style, to make the film itself more exportable, or more in line with the style or concerns of a particular foreign cinema or audience. ‘Transnational’ can also be used to describe a film that moves beyond the national to address the regional or global. This could mean positioning the film as part of a regional tradition or hailing a global audience familiar with a multiplicity of national cinemas and global genre trends.

In using the term transnational, I am also concerned with how we can push against, as Mette Hjort puts it, ‘transnational as a largely self-evident qualifier’.⁷ I mean this in the sense that ‘transnational’ is sometimes used to imply a shared definition that is subsequently not provided; this vague usage can lead to imprecision, as well as implying that ‘transnational’ denotes one specific situation. So, while I examine select genre hybrids of the British horror film resurgence in this project, the specific ways that these films signify as transnational has implications for how transnationalism can operate in film more broadly and how we can study and use the term itself. Indeed, I have used it to discuss Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and its hybridisation of 1950s Hollywood teen films, Italian spaghetti Westerns and Iranian New Wave aesthetics.⁸

British horror cinema of the 2000s represents a particularly fruitful site for examination for a number of reasons. The horror genre seems particularly suited to the strategies of transnational genre hybridity. Horror is concerned with hybridity, focusing on liminality and the uncanny. Also, the late 1990s ushered in an international boom in horror, with the rise of Asian horror and a renewal of interest in and access to European horror. This flourishing of international horror led to industrial and national cross-pollination (for example, the spate of American remakes of J-horror films) that helped to position the horror genre as a key site of transnational exchange. And horror has a celebrated history of genre impurity; many of the most well-regarded horror films, from The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) to Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, Tomas Alfredson, 2008), are genre hybrids. In terms of other British genres, non-horror films of this time period have not, for the most part, been notable for their genre hybridity. Transnational concerns have often been explored via the experiences of immigrant and postcolonial populations – as with Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy (2004) and, more light-heartedly, the films of Gurinder Chadha – or treated in a superficial and commercialised way, as with films like Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, 2008) or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2011).

This period of British horror cinema also provides a useful lens through which to examine transnational genre hybridity because the idea of ‘British cinema’ is so vexed in the first place and Britain’s film culture and industry are not completely separate entities. Several academic projects have set out to define British cinema. In his 1995 book Waving the Flag, Andrew Higson suggests that analysis of British cinema ought to take into account the films that are watched in Britain, including those produced and made outside the UK.⁹ From a different angle, in 2007 the UK film industry established a ‘cultural test’ to assess whether a film is British enough to receive funding from the UK government based on: content (setting, characters, subject matter); its representation of the diversity of Britain’s culture, heritage and creativity; its use of British studios and shooting locations; and its involvement with British creative talent for production and post-production.¹⁰ The discursive construction of British cinema has been integral to UK film policies and defining British cinema since it was enacted.

Sarah Street, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, discusses British cinema in terms of how it, and other ‘cultural referents’, construct a ‘dominant conception of what it is to be British, a collective consciousness about nationhood’, though her work focuses on films defined as British through their UK government registration.¹¹ John Hill talks about British cinema as linked to ‘nationalism and myths of national unity’ but argues it can increasingly ‘re-imagine the nation, or rather nations within Britain, and also to address the specificities of a national culture in a way which does not presume a homogeneous or pure national identity’.¹² These critics focus on British cinema’s ability to draw from and constitute national identity and dominant cultural constructions of the nation. And while Street focuses on films produced in Britain, Hill discusses three potential foci of examination: production, audience or the representation of nation.

As Susan Hayward notes, ‘there are no easy definitions’ for what constitutes a national cinema.¹³ All of these definitions work alongside others to constitute multiple and shifting discursive constructions of British cinema, defined not only by the films that compose it and the people who make those films but by industry figures, the government legislating around the industry and the critics and academics that discuss the industry and its films. While Street, Hill and Higson’s definitions work for their studies, this book is not focused on defining British cinema or what it ought to be. I am not British; I live and work in the US, so the stakes of my definition are necessarily less personal and political than that of Street, Hill and Higson. While British cinema could be defined as the products of the British film industry, transnational film production has made such easy definitions untenable. If a British director makes a film financed primarily by a Hollywood studio, with editing done in Britain and effects done by a company run out of Spain, is the film British?

For the purposes of this book, I want to consider how a film’s intertextuality positions it as part of a national cinema, as well as how a film addresses issues prevalent in its contemporary national cultural discourse (that is, how it reflects local concerns). British cinema, then, is constituted by the films produced by the British film industry that are in some way legible, to a person with a reasonable level of knowledge about the industry and history of British cinema, as having come from that industry or British culture more broadly. Britishness is then also partly determined by British film culture. Legibility is often achieved primarily through British direction or production, but it can also be achieved in part through some combination of industrial factors and setting (the UK), topic (e.g. British politics), characters (e.g. British hoodies), theme (e.g. laddish masculinity or postcolonial race relations), genre (e.g. the heritage costume drama, the social realist drama) and marketing campaigns (trailers and posters that explicitly or implicitly reference the ‘Britishness’ of the film).

While work on British cinema has, at least partly, shifted from national cinema studies to address the transnational, recent scholarship on British horror has remained invested in the national, likely because the Britishness of British cinema has so long been a focus of British cinema studies. Asserting the Britishness of British horror allows scholars to claim both academic and cultural legitimacy for horror and its study. Thus, Ian Conrich praises 2000s British horror for its use of British locations; John Fitzgerald notes specific films’ connections to British culture, while Steven Gerrard makes similar connections to subgenres; David Pirie takes heart that ‘the great English horror myths are still here’; and James Leggott sees horror as redeemable for its ‘naturalistic edge’ (i.e. link to the tradition of British social realist film-making) and national socio-political commentary.¹⁴ While I am also clearly invested in the Britishness of 2000s British horror, my focus is on how genre hybridity works to actively position these films as British for specific ends. Here, Britishness as a quality is not a prescriptive label applied to denote general approval. Instead, transnational genre hybridity can operate as both a cultural and an industrial strategy through which film-makers can encourage audiences to view a film as asserting its Britishness through the use of formal and narrative conventions from specific British films and genres. Within the context of British film culture, this assertion of Britishness affirms the film’s cultural relevance (and thus critical and cultural worth) within and to that culture.

In terms of the overlap between industry and culture in the UK, most basically, there are voices within British film culture who are also part of the film industry. In addition, the industry has historically relied significantly on governmental funding and oversight, and certain segments of British film culture have actively worked to sustain the industry by shaping the governmental and cultural conversations about it. This is particularly true of middlebrow British film culture. Lucy Mazdon has discussed the British middlebrow as ‘fluid’ and historically contingent, but also ‘a means of negotiating pleasure and improvement’ related to ‘cultural advancement’.¹⁵ Mazdon looks to the BFI and BBC as examples of the middlebrow, casting Sight & Sound as more concerned with arthouse cinema than ‘mainstream middlebrow commercial cinema’.¹⁶

However, I posit a slightly different framing, drawing on Janet Harbord’s work in Film Cultures.¹⁷ Harbord looks at the site of the film festival as an institutional site of taste-making – a particular strand of film culture – to show how film cultures produce cultural discourses that film-makers can engage with through their work. Putting Mazdon and Harbord in conversation, I examine British middlebrow film culture as a key context that provides an additional set of meanings that are key to understanding how transnational genre hybridity is operating in 2000s British horror cinema. For my purposes, British middlebrow film culture includes sources that place more emphasis on improvement and cultural advancement and in doing so elevate ‘artsy’ commercial cinema alongside art cinema, like Sight & Sound. This definition includes publications like Sight & Sound, newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent, industry publications like Screen International and a variety of writers working within film journalism and even academic film studies. This strand of film culture is positioned as professional and aimed at the cineliterate.¹⁸ Traditionally, middlebrow British film culture has emphasised the cultural importance of taste, aesthetics and auteurism, as well as espousing a general suspicion about the potential value of genre cinema. The players in middlebrow British film culture have a vested interest in British cinema, whether that means trying to define British cinema, critiquing government regulation (or lack thereof) or debating the best way forward for British film-makers, the industry or film policy.

Of course, there is not a single, monolithic British film culture; the strand I examine is one of several. There are horror fan communities in the UK that organise, or organised, around magazines like Shivers (published 1992–8 and featuring writer Kim Newman), Dark Side (published 1990– 2009, 2011–present) and the US magazine Fangoria (1979–present). Mainstream commercial film culture within Britain is more genre-friendly and can tend to be focused on box office totals and stars – this strand would be represented by magazines like Empire and Total Film (for the most part), radio programmes like BBC Radio 5 Live’s Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review and television shows like the BBC’s Talking Movies and BBC Two’s The Culture Show (again, to some extent). By defining middlebrow British film culture as the segment of film culture in the UK that concerns itself with British cinema, I am necessarily constructing a particular frame around the applicable contributing texts and leaving other texts aside that are no less worthy of study but are not directly relevant for my purposes. There is clearly room for additional reception studies work in the area of British film cultures.

Transnational genre hybridity in 2000s British horror cinema is a reaction to several discourses circulating in middlebrow British film culture at the time. By drawing intertextually on a variety of British film traditions, some more and some less exportable – from the Second World War’s Ealing comedy cycle to the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series – the films I examine position themselves in a lineage that confers both prestige and cultural capital. Using recognisably British film genres to reframe foreign horror subgenres allows these films to respond to discourses about horror and anxiety over the ‘Britishness’ of British cinema that circulated in British film culture at the time, attempting to legitimise the horror genre through association.

While the British industry and film culture did not use the term transnational genre hybridity, they did demonstrate a clear awareness of the phenomenon as it manifested in many of the most critically, and often financially, successful British horror films of the time. As James Leggott’s quotation above shows, early films like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead were marked out as genre hybrids. The Independent’s Ryan Gilbey called 28 Days Later ‘a zombie movie, but not your common-or-garden-kind’ à la George Romero – one incorporating Britain’s ‘tradition of desolate, appalled surrealism’ as seen in films like Patrick Keiller’s difficult to classify London (1994) or Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973).¹⁹ Shaun of the Dead was marketed and largely received as the first ‘zomrom-com’, combining Romerian zombies with the British romantic comedy tradition, then most recently manifested in Richard Curtis’s spate of 1990s and early 2000s rom-coms like Notting Hill (1999). James Watkins’s hoodie horror Eden Lake (2008) was dubbed ‘Deliverance meets Lord of the Flies’, a ‘very English Apocalypse Now’ with ‘hints of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and perhaps even Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills’.²⁰

The ‘genre-bending rocket of a film’ Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011) was compared to Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976) and even E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982), but also Ealing’s Hue and Cry (Charles Crichton, 1947).²¹ The paratexts around James Watkins’s later collaboration with the revived Hammer Studios, The Woman in Black (2012), placed simultaneous emphasis on the film as a new take on British author Susan Hill’s classic Gothic novel and the influence of the visuals and atmosphere of Japanese horror films of the 1990s and 2000s (J-horror).²² Finally, there are A Field in England (Ben Wheatley, 2013) and Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), critical darlings despite their meagre financial returns, framed through their art-cinema/horror hybridity, as well as their geographical and temporal settings, as both British and European. This scope, starting with 28 Days Later and ending with this pair of arthouse horror films, allows me to map the