ANDREW SYDER

Knowing the Rules

Postmodernism and the Horror Film

Detail from poster advertising Last House on the Left (1972)

(photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences)

The term postmodernism is bandied

around rather freely in contemporary culture,
especially with respect to recent Hollywood
movies. And often, postmodern comes to be
a descriptor filled with derision, especially
among critics seeking to dismiss popular culture, with postmodern blank parody and
lack of affect viewed as tapping a tired lack of
originality and inauthentic pleasures. Fredric
Jamesons seminal essay, Postmodernism, or
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is the
most frequently ransacked to describe the
emergence of a new kind of flatness or
depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in
the most literal sense1 and to confirm that
the producers of culture have nowhere to
turn but to the past: the imitation of dead
styles, speech through all the masks and
voices stored up in the imaginary museum of
a now global culture.2
Recent horror movies have trended
strongly towards Jamesonian postmodern
characteristics, and also have been subject to
the negative judgments that can be associated
78

with postmodernismnot least because the

films are often slick high-concept packages
aimed at the MTV generation, featuring casts
of trendy teen actors from popular television
shows. But in spite of the (usually highminded) criticism surrounding turns toward
postmodernism, these postmodern horror
films have been remarkably popular and
financially successful. Employing extremes of
self-reflexivity with copious intertextual
references to earlier horror landmarks,
postmodern horror texts revitalized the ailing
genre in the mid-1990s and continue to boast
commercial success. The most influential of
these is Scream (1996), which grossed over
$100 million domestically and spawned numerous imitations, including two sequels of
its own. Its postmodern conceit is simple:
Scream is a slasher movie in which the characters are well versed in the rules and
conventions of slasher movies, to the self-referential point of characters talking at length
about earlier slasher pics, such as Halloween
(1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and Nightmare on

Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture

Harmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 78-88

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Elm Street (1984)the latter of which, like

Scream, was directed by Wes Craven.
The wake of Scream provoked the postmodern horror boom, with many films
coming from Scream-related talent; indeed,
Screams director Wes Craven and writer
Kevin Williamson themselves are something
of a cottage industry in postmodern horror.
Before Scream, Freddy Krueger received a
postmodern makeover with Wes Cravens New
Nightmare (1994), in which Freddy enters
our world to threaten the real-life makers of
the Elm Street seriesincluding Heather
Langenkamp (the actress who played the
heroine in the original A Nightmare on Elm
Street) and Craven himself. Hot from Scream,
Williamson has been prominently attached to
a number of other postmodern horror movies,
including the retro-slasher I Know What You
Did Last Summer (1997), the high-school
body-snatchers flick The Faculty (1998) and
the successful Halloween H20 (1998) revival of
the Halloween series.
Elsewhere, the pop-cultural universe of
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantinos
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) features selfconscious casting of cult horror celebrities like
Tom Savini and John Saxon. The Bates Motel
was renovated in 1998 by Gus Van Sant, who
dared a shot-for-shot color remake of Alfred
Hitchcocks Psycho (1960), taking Jamesonian
imitation of the past to the nth degree. The
Blair Witch Project (1999) was staggeringly
successful, and shared its self-reflexive narrative frame (filmmakers lost in the woods
searching for supernatural beings) with the
earlier The Last Broadcast (1998). Also illustrating postmodern self-reflexivity, the
subsequent Scream installments, Tesis (1996),
Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000) and Halloween
Resurrection (2002) set their plots in different
sites of media production (film school and
festivals, television and web broadcasts).
There have also been straighter horror films
that each channel distinct versions of the
horror format with a glib knowingness,
displaying to varying degrees the postmodern
self-awareness and irony which seems to be
integral to the continued success of these

kinds of films, such as Urban Legends (1998),

Bats (1999), The In Crowd (2000), Dracula
2000 (2000), Jason X (2001), Ghosts of Mars
(2001) and two high-tech William Castle
remakes House on Haunted Hill (1999) and
Thir13een Ghosts (2001). Most of these postmodern horror movies have even become the
subject of parodic imitation themselves in
the Scary Movie series (2000-2003).
Still, some old school horror fans and cultural tastemakers position postmodernism
as negative, reflected in that each Scream installment after the original has been indicted
by some critics for its apparent superficiality
and derivativeness, suggesting a decline in
the genre since it went postmodern. Culture
Kiosque titled its Scream 3 review, The death
of the postmodern slasher pic,3 while another
critic states: Scream 3 and its spinoffs will
make Scream and Scream 2 seem like great
masterpieces of postmodern horror. As the
tongue in cheek genre again begins to ruin the
horror film as an effective meditation on issues which affect societythings will become
intolerable.4 Such pejorative views, however,
risk obscuring important questions about how
and why the horror genre has embraced
postmodernism with such fervor.
Rather than seeing this recent wave of horror movies as the death of the genreor
even their postmodern hallmarks as representing an entirely new developmentI will
argue that a certain kinship has existed between postmodernism and horror for quite
some time. The interlacing of postmodernism
and horror in these recent films affords the
opportunity to more clearly examine interconnections between the two, which will not only
facilitate a greater understanding of contemporary horror cinema, but also provide a new
model through which to view the horror
genre as a whole. Both postmodern theory
and the horror genre are fundamentally concerned with parallel questions about how we
perceive and make sense of the world around
us, and as such both offer comparable models
for ordering the knowledge we possess about
the external world.

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Perception and Knowledge in

Postmodern Theory
The intersection of postmodern theory with
the horror genre occurs most prominently
around phenomenological issues. Phenomenologically-oriented postmodern theory,
especially the theory that derives from
Friedrich Nietzsche, is concerned with the
challenging of century-old epistemological assumptions about how we perceive and make
sense of phenomena in the world. Tracing
phenomenological postmodern thought back
to Nietzsche is productive, due to the potent
correlations between his writings and the horror genre. An examination of horror s
organization of its visual field, particularly
during suspense sequences, allows the teasing
out of phenomenological and epistemological
presuppositions which underlie those organizational choices, presuppositions akin to
many of Nietzsches concerns. Returning to
Nietzsche is also a strategic gesture in that
postmodernism is often thought to be a recent
phenomenon, and his work reminds us that
the crises associated with postmodernity have
been around since the nineteenth century
just as many of the concerns of postmodern
horror movies can be traced back throughout
the history of the genre.
Many scholars have located Nietzsches
work as the foundation for much of the
twentieth-century emergence of postmodern
thought. Jrgen Habermas has referred
to Nietzsche as the turning point in the entry
into postmodernity, 5 while Cornel West
has mapped out Nietzsches influence on
postmodern American philosophers such as
W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn and Richard
Rorty.6 West points to three particular areas of
influence: the move toward antirealism or
conventionalism in ontology (the rejection of a
theory-free external world), the move toward
antifoundationalism in epistemology (the
rejection of any solid foundations for knowledge claims), and the move toward the
transcendentalization of the subject or the dismissal of the mind as a sphere of inquiry (the
rejection of a Cartesian mind-body split).
West also outlines Nietzsches influence in the
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wider field of postmodern thought, through

the differently inflected paradigms of such
diverse theorists as Jacques Derrida, Paul
de Man, Michel Foucault, Edward Said,
Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer and
Jean-Paul Sartre.7
The centrality of Nietzsche to the foundations of postmodernism lies in his explicit
critique of Platowhat Gilles Deleuze characterizes as the questioning of what it means
to reverse Platonism.8 Nietzsche argued that
although we believe we know something
about the things of the world when we speak
of them, all we really possess are metaphors for
those things, metaphors which in no way correspond to an original entity or essence, which
has particular impact on conceptions of truth:
to be truthful means to employ the usual
metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is
the duty to lie according to fixed convention, to
lie with the herd and in a manner binding by
everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is
the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the
manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries old, and
precisely by means of this unconsciousness and
forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.9

Instead of Platos position that a truth exists

external to senses and cognition, Nietzsche
argued that all our knowledge of the world is
a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which
contains not a single point of view which
would be true in itself or really and universally apart from man.10 In other words, our
knowledge of the world represents a metamorphosis of the world into man, with the
laws of nature existing only within our perceptions of them: all these relations always
refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that
we actually know about these laws of nature
is what we ourselves bring to them. 11
Nietzsche further argues that the laws of nature as we conceptualize them are founded
upon human senses of perception that are
fundamentally unreliable and deceptive: our
eyes only gliding over the surfaces of things,
they are content to receive stimuli and, as it
were, to engage in a groping game on the

SYDER

backs of things. 12 Thus, whereas Platonic

thought conceived of external laws of nature
which can be rationally perceived if one is
careful enough, for Nietzsche there are no extrinsic laws of nature, and the laws that we
ascribe to nature are not only anthropomorphized, they are founded on deceptive
sensory misperceptions.
Querying what it means to reverse
Platonism, Nietzsche sustains a tension
between our perception of and knowledge
about the world, such that we can no longer
trust in the knowledge we acquire of the
world through our senses. This tension can be
seen throughout postmodern thought, particularly in the rejection of a theory-free
external world and the rejection of any solid
foundations for knowledge claims. For example, Jean Baudrillards and others ideas of
simulation/simulacrum13 extends Nietzsches
epistemological and phenomenological concerns: the simulacrum derives from a notion
of the world as comprised of surface appearances which lack any inner essence and
possess no transcendental meaning outside of
those meanings that we place on top of them.
In other words, Nietzsche and the postmodern thinkers who followed posit a
fundamental phenomenological uncertainty
about the apparent, familiar world around us
and our perception of it.

Perception and Knowledge in the

Horror Genre
Both the thematics and textual organization of
horror suggest that the genre is fundamentally
engaged with many of the same issues as the
phenomenological strain of postmodern
theory. The relationship between our perception of and knowledge about the world
informs many of the basic tropes of the genre.
For example, horror is often described as a
genre that taps into our fear of the unknown;
that is, the horror of the genre frequently derives from the safety of the familiar, known
world being violated by something unknown,
something that lies outside of the laws we
have ascribed to nature. This is particularly
true in the horror tales dealing with monsters

or the supernatural, such that Robin Wood has

argued most horror movies follow a
deceptively simple formula: normality is
threatened by the Monster, wherein normality means conformity with dominant social
norms.14 Woods concerns are primarily ideological and psychoanalytical, but his
paradigm could be rearticulated in phenomenological and epistemological terms as, the
known world is threatened by the unknown.
Throwing our ability to know the familiar,
material world into crisis, horror seems based
on an understanding that behind the apparent, known world may lie something which
evades our ability to metamorphose the world
into man, an unknowable sphere that represents a potential fissure in our faith in the
apparent, known world. Gothic horror
provides an especially potent variation on this
in its opposition of the diurnal and nocturnal
as dual worlds. Charlene Bunnell has noted
of the Gothic novel that the conventional
assumptions, embedded in Christian mythologies, that the daylight world corresponds
to good and the night world to evil, are
not so simple:
One world is the external onecultural and
institutional; it is light because it is familiar
and common. The other world is the internal
oneprimitive and intuitive; it is dark, not
because it necessarily signifies evil (although it
may), but because it is unfamiliar and unknown.15

Noting the unknown in the Gothic novel is

coded as dark and the known as light, Bunnell
points to a particular significant relationship
between knowledge and visibility: the dark
and light of the dual worlds directly correlate
between the familiarity of the world and our
relative ability to see it. Echoing phenomenologically-oriented postmodern theory,
our (in)ability to know the world around
us in horror is intrinsically linked to the
(un)reliability of our senses of perception.
This epistemological tension between
knowledge and perception is also alluded to
in Tzvetan Todorovs description of the uncanny and the marvelous, two possible
responses elicited by fantastic literature
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which positions characters (and the reader) to

acknowledge events unexplainable by familiar laws of the natural world, such as the
appearance of vampires or devils:
either he is the victim of an illusion of the
senses, of a product of the imaginationand
laws of the world then remain what they are; or
else the event has indeed taken place, it is an
integral part of realitybut then this reality is
controlled by laws unknown to us.16

In the case of the uncanny, our knowledge

of the world is challenged but remains
intact, because we had merely misperceived
the event. In the case of the marvelous, our
perceptions have in fact been accurate, but our
initial knowledge of the world is proven
to have been incorrect or incomplete.
Adapting Todorovs remarks to horror
cinema allows us to note that terror and
suspense are often generated by keeping the
relationship between perception and knowledge in a state of flux, such that we are unsure
about the reliability of our senses and/or unsure about the stability of the laws that we
have ascribed to nature. Perceptions role is in
fact even more significant in horror films, because of cinemas ability to represent the
world by way of actual sensory perceptions,
stimulating our visual and aural senses in a
much more direct and experiential manner
than the written prose of literature. Whereas
literature alludes to perception, in film we are
able to experience it first-hand, with the
camera able to both enable or curtail vision.
As such, horror movies structuring of
the visual field implies certain phenomenological presuppositions about how we
perceive and understand the world around
us. This is particularly clear in Gothic horror
films: the translation of Gothics dual worlds
to celluloid takes the form of actual night/day
filming, or they are alluded to through
stylistic devices in the mise-en-scne that either
allow or obscure vision. The darkness
of the nocturnal world may also be rendered through the use of shadows,
chiaroscuro lighting, diffusion, mist and
fog, or off-screen space, blocking vision,
keeping objects hidden and unknown.
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The knowledge of film-as-film is figured as reassuring in 1972s

Last House on the Left (Wes Craven)
(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

The Val Lewton-produced Gothic chillers of

the 1940s are exemplars of this tendency,
wherein the monster is almost never revealed to the camera. An archetypal example
is Cat People (1942), the story of Irena, a young
Serbian woman in America who may (or may
not) be afflicted with an ancient curse that
turns her into a killer panther upon sexual
arousal. The films acclaimed suspense sequences illustrate the particular relationships
between structures of seeing and the un/
known in horror. When jealous Irena follows
her rival Alice (who is competing for the affections of Irenas husband) down a street at
night, Irena mysteriously vanishes. Her footsteps suddenly stop, and she is not seen for
the rest of the sequence. The lighting design
here is carefully organized such that the spots
of light on the sidewalk under each streetlamp
are separated by stretches of deep darkness.
Sensing that something might be following
her, Alice begins to walk briskly and nervously through the dark stretches, pausing to
look back every time she reaches a bright area
under a lamp. When a busstable signifier of

SYDER

the known worldpulls up beside her, the

suspense of the sequence is dissipated, and
she enters back into the familiar, social world.
In another, similar sequence, in an attempt
to escape from what sounds like a panther,
Alice jumps into a swimming pool for safety.
Again, there is a strong visual and thematic
dialectic between light and dark, known and
unknown, articulated here through editing
between two distinct patterns of mise-en-scne.
The scene cuts back and forth between Alice
waiting at the illuminated center of the pool
and shots from her point-of-view looking towards the dark shadows at the sides of the
pool, which may or may not conceal a killer
cat. Once again, the fear of the unknown is
alleviated when the main lights of the indoor
pool are switched on, returning Alice to
the visible, known world.
These sequences explicitly indicate the
inability of both the character and the camera
to see the unknown threat as a source of
suspense. Light is specifically aligned with
safety and the darkness with threat or danger.
That which is visible to us corresponds to the
known world, which is in turn coded as safe;
that which is beyond visibility is coded as
both unknown and threatening. A clear
demarcation between known and unknown
worlds, represented through a coherent spatiality in which the areas of darkness are visibly
distinct from the areas of light, places a degree of faith in visual perception. When we
are able to perceive the world, we can be sure
of its laws; but when our vision is blocked,
we cannot be certain of the laws governing
the unknown. In other words, the Gothic
horror film acknowledges that there are
potentially unknown things in the world,
things to threaten the laws of the world as we
know them, but positions those things as discrete and separate from a known world in
which we can trust.
Other types of horror films are also organized around the same dialectic of perception
and knowledge, although often with different
inflections. Slasher/splatter movies Last
House on the Left (1972) and The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre (1974) offer reversals of the

Dizzying mise-en-abme: Wes Craven as himself in Wes

Cravens New Nightmare (1994), writing and directing the film
as we watch
(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Gothic tendencies of Cat People. The majority

of the murders in both films take place not at
night, but in the bright sunlight of the diurnal
world, and they are committed by human
rather than supernatural monsters. Instead of
finding safety in the light, both films make the
visible, known world the primary source of
terrorprimarily through grotesquely realistic gore effects. The opening of Texas Chain
Saw is exemplary: a totally black screen is
punctured by flash images (lit by a camera
flashbulb) of corpses that have been illegally
exhumed. The source of shock in the sequence stems less from the stretches of
blackness than from what we can see: the brief
images of rotting corpses and the horrific act
of desecration. In other words, the knowledge
of the world we acquire from perception is
posited as threatening, suggesting a fear of the
known as much as a fear of the unknown.
Horror films centered around ESP or mad
scientists offer yet more variations of the
knowledge/perception dialectic. Focusing on
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characters with powers of extra-sensory perception implies limitations to our normal

sense of perception, and our faith in the laws
of nature is reduced correspondingly, as the
fact of ESP/telekinesis would go against rational scientific thought. Films with mad
scientists offer similar disruptions by bending
the objective scientific laws of nature to allow for such fantastic creations as the
Frankenstein monster, Dr. Moreaus island,
or Ray Millands X-Ray vision serum in The
Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963).
In placing the relationship between our perception and knowledge of the world in a
constant state of tension and flux, the horror
genre mirrors many of the primary thrusts of
postmodern theory, even in those horror films
(like Cat People and Texas Chain Saw) not normally categorized as postmodern. In its
various configurations of the relationship
between perception and the laws of nature
such as those outlined by Todorovthe
horror genre can be mapped along various
points of the spectrum between Plato and
Nietzsche. For Plato there was a theory-free
external world, and there were solid foundations for knowledge claims about that world;
for Nietzsche, neither was the case. In attempting to reverse Platonism, Nietzsche and
his descendants grapple with how to overcome centuries of conditioning which have
led us to instinctually believe that our senses
can be reliable and that we can determine the
laws of nature by observing the world. By
destabilizing the trust we place in our perceptions or by questioning the laws of nature,
horror movies move away from the security
and rationality of a Platonic worldview,
towards the potentially nihilistic irrationality
favored by Nietzsche, wherein we no longer
have solid foundations for understanding the
world around us. In horror this erosion of the
stable framework of perception is manifested
as both terrifying and threatening.

The Postmodern Horror Film

When viewed through the rhythms and tensions between the known/unknown and the
Nietzschean destabilization of perception that
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accompanies them, we will be able to see how

the formal and thematic strategies of the recent wave of postmodern horror movies
amount to more than simply just an imitation
of dead styles and a new form of superficiality and depthlessness. Rather than marking a
break from past manifestations of the genre,
the coupling of postmodernism and horror in
films such as Scream in fact makes explicit the
correlation between the two that had been
present all along. Such traits as self-reflexivity and intertextuality merely reframe the
terms of the known/unknown dialectic and
further reconfigure the relationship between
perception of and knowledge about the
world. Specifically, by representing the
known/unknown dialectic in a particularly
self-conscious way, postmodern horror films
draw attention to their own textual construction and the rules and conventions through
which they operate. The effect of such
deconstructive strategies, as we shall see, is
the suggestion that the terror and suspense
generated by contemporary horror movies
stem as much from the concerns about film
medium itself as from a fear of the unknown.
The self-reflexivity of postmodern horror
movies seems especially purposeful because
the horror genre, since its inception, has always relied heavily on language and rhetoric
as a means of representing the unknown
forces that frighten us. Todorov argues that
this consistent use of rhetorical figures is a result of the fantastic emerging from rhetoric:
The supernatural is born of language, it is both
its consequence and its proof: not only do the
devil and vampires exist only in words, but
language alone enables us to conceive what is
always absent: the supernatural.17

Rhetorical figures such as vampires,

werewolves and zombies all are founded
upon sets of rules that govern their existencevampires traditionally drink blood,
turn into bats, fear garlic and crosses, and can
be killed by sunlight or a stake through the
heart. The mythical figure takes form within
the boundaries of these rules; without vampire lore and its rules, there would be no
vampire. In many horror films, the expert

SYDER

who is able to destroy the monster (such as

Draculas nemesis, Van Helsing) is powerful
not because of any physical or supernatural
strength, but rather because s/he possesses an
understanding of the rules that define the
monsters existence. Shadows and darkness
in Gothic horror operate as a similar rhetorical
devices. The nocturnal realm serves to signify
the unknown; the restriction of vision is a rhetorical gesture in its own right.18
Postmodern horror movies deployment of
self-reflexivity and intertextuality explicitly
exposes and demystifies this rhetorical nature
of representations of the unknown, encouraging the audience to see the monster/unknown
as a fictional construct that can only exist in
language. When, for example, the protagonists in From Dusk Till Dawn realize they are
battling vampires, rather than turning to a
Van Helsing-style expert for advice, they instead discuss how Hammer Horror actor
Peter Cushing would slay vampires when he
played Van Helsing, reminding us that
Tarantinos vampires are of the same order as
those vampires the protagonists refer to from
the old horror moviesan effect of rhetoric.19
The Scream trilogy offers similar strategies of
rhetorical deconstruction, such as the characters self-reflexive discussions of the rules one
needs to follow in order to survive a slasher
movie, or the killers highly self-conscious
costumesthe grim reaper black cape and
Halloween ghostface mask recalling both
Edvard Munchs The Scream as well as masked
slasher-movie killers like Michael Myers (Halloween) and Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th). In
Wes Cravens New Nightmare, Wes Craven
(playing himself) even explains explicitly that
Freddy Krueger is a rhetorical symbol of our
age-old primal fears about unknown evils,
and his form as the supernatural killer with
finger-knives is merely the current version.
The effect of postmodern horrors selfreflexivity and intertextuality also alters how
we understand the known world; the familiar
world itself revealed to be a rhetorical construct, not just the horror of the unknown.
Exposing both known and unknown worlds as
constructs, the relationship between the two

becomes more schizophrenic and fragmentary

than in other horror film models, with no clear
demarcation between the two. For example,
The Blair Witch Projects pretensions toward
documentary reality (both in the film and its
promotional materials) presents itself as entirely mediated experience, where every scene
in the film is shot from the perspective of the
protagonists camera lens, insisting on reflexive
awareness of filming. Both the mysterious, unknown sphere occupied by the Blair Witch and
the familiar, known world of the Maryland
backwoods are presented equally as rhetorical
constructs. We are offered no possibility of direct access to the familiar, known world,
suggesting, in accordance with Nietzsche, that
we can never actually gain unmediated access
to the known world.20
This deconstructing of the known is
rendered in particularly extreme ways
through the dizzying use of mise-en-abme in
Wes Cravens New Nightmare. Throughout the
film, we are left uncertain whether the scenes
we are watching are intended to signify the
known, familiar world (one in which there
have already been six previous Freddy
Krueger films) or a dream world that does
not subscribe to the laws of nature as we
know them. The film opens with images of a
new Freddy glove under construction, in
framing that mimics the opening glove-making sequence of the original A Nightmare on
Elm Street. In New Nightmare, however,
the scene is then revealed to be taking place
on a movie set, when Wes Craven yells
cut and calls for more blood. The stability
of real as opposed to the fantasy world
(here, cinematic fantasy) is undermined yet
again, when Freddys glove magically comes
to life and what we thought was the real/
known movie set is shown to be one of
Heather Langenkamps nightmares when
she wakes in the (presumably true)
real world. However, this real world
is consistently undermined throughout the
film, because the film we are watching is
(paradoxically) also the same film that
Craven is shown writing as part of the story
of New Nightmare, the film we paid money to
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watch. When Langenkamp visits Craven to

discuss his new Elm Street screenplay, their
dialogue is shown to be in the script he
is writing in that very scene; when the
script on Cravens computer screen ends the
scene with Fade to Blackthe film we
are watching dutifully follows. Cravens
authorial presence within the film similarly
underscores the discursive quality of these
experiences, further undermining the stability of the known.
Compared to the earlier forms of the genre,
these postmodern horror movies pose a significant reformulation of the relationship
between perception and knowledge. As
we saw, the play between known and unknown in the earlier films put our sensory
perceptions and/or the laws of nature as we
understand them into crisis. While most
postmodern horror films still play upon
some of these primal fears, because the
known and unknown worlds are both revealed to be rhetorical constructs, the two
blur together, erasing any meaningful distinction between them. Trying to untangle the
two (or more?) worlds in a film like Wes
Cravens New Nightmare is to fight a losing
battle. The effect is such that these films seem
to suggest that distinctions between a
known and an unknown world are somewhat arbitrary, that we can never truly know
the world around us to begin with. Moreover,
the blurring of these boundaries is accentuated by the role of (filmic) representation
itself. In The Blair Witch Project, for example,
an ambiguity is sustained about whether the
Blair Witch exists or notan ambiguity which
derives from the fact that the (ostensibly)
documentary footage shot by the missing
filmmakers is the only source of evidence we
have about what happened to them.
It bears investigation that the recent wave of
horror movies continues to draw audiences,
apparently providing them with the chills and
thrills they expect from the genre. One might
think that continually reminding viewers that
they are watching a movie and that the
monster is a rhetorical device would distance
them from the drama and suspense, yet the
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popularity of films like Scream and Blair Witch

would seem to suggest otherwise. Indeed, the
pleasure of suspense in watching Scream derives largely from how the rules of the slasher
are explicitly and self-reflexively exposed.
Recent horrors insistent focus on the cinematic medium itself provides the key to
understanding the shift away from earlier
manifestations of the genre. In their representation of both known and unknown worlds as
rhetorical constructs, recent horror movies
seem predicated on the belief that knowledge
of the world exists only through mediated
structures, particularly those of the media itself, reflecting postmodern theorists assertion
that the world possesses no intrinsic, unmediated essence, and the known world therefore
(like the unknown) originates in language.
One of the central postmodern turns in recent
films, compared to their predecessors, is that
the film medium itself becomes more expressly implicated in how we perceive and
make sense of the world. The number of recent horror movies focused on the media and
its creators underscores this: Wes Cravens
New Nightmare, The Blair Witch Project, The Last
Broadcast and Urban Legends: Final Cut all center around filmmakers; the Scream series
features filmmakers and broadcast journalists
as central characters and sets the final installment in Hollywood; Halloween Resurrection
revolves around a live webcast.
This suspicion that the world cannot be
known outside of mediated structures provides the primary source of horror and
suspense in these films, linking them closely
to Nietzsches belief that nature has no laws of
its own. Indeed, postmodern horror films
seem less interested in questioning the laws of
nature than the laws through which the
genre constructs its world. Scream literalizes
this, as a command of its world demands not
so much knowledge of the laws of nature as
a mastery of the laws of the slasher film;
knowledge of the textual conventions of the
slasher film is crucial to the characters survival. The film also invites the audience to
mobilize its slasher rhetorical savvy, with
much of the suspense in the film stemming

SYDER

from watching the characters being placed in

jeopardy because they failed to heed the rules,
as evidenced in the prologue where Drew
Barrymore is terrorized by threatening phone
calls that focus on the subject of scary movies.
The sequence self-consciously plays upon
many genre clichs, such as Barrymore
continually walking backwards into poorly lit
areas that might conceal the killer. Whereas
the play between light and dark in Gothic
horror movies like Cat People established a certain relationship between perception and
knowledge, in Screams prologue we are encouraged to read such plays on perception
more in terms of the rhetorical conventions of
the slasher genre. Concern about the known
world being threatened by the unknown
plays second fiddle to manipulation and subversion of how slasher movies construct both
worlds. Indeed, at the level of narrative
unfolding and viewer comprehension, Scream
operates as textual game.
By usurping the laws of nature with the
laws of the genre, postmodern horror movies
reflect the media-saturated culture from
which they sprang. Most of our knowledge of
the world derives from what we glean from
the medias representations of the world; how
we perceive and make sense of experience,
then, is in significant measures controlled and
conditioned by the media. The possibility that
the world is actually quite different from its
media representation is now a common social
concern; postmodern horror taps into these
fears. The media steps into the space between
our sensory perceptions and the world of

appearances, and the notion of the known

world itself being nothing more than a rhetorical construct is presented as something
quite troubling and destabilizing. One of the
primal thrusts of the horror genre is, after all,
the fear of losing control, of being a helpless
victim. In earlier manifestations of the genre,
that pertained mostly to the threat attached to
loss of control over sensory perceptions or loss
of control over the laws of nature. In the
postmodern horror film, loss of control pertains also to the power of the media over how
we perceive and make sense of the world, the
power of the media to fabricate reality. As
such, to become an expert in these films requires not so much knowledge of the laws of
nature as textual mastery of the genres rules
and conventionsmastery over how the
genre constructs its world. To control the
media is to control the world.
When Cravens Last House on the Left
opened in 1972, the poster instructed patrons
to keep repeating to themselves that its only
a movie if they got too scared, suggesting
that the knowledge of the film as film was reassuring. By the time of Cravens Scream,
however, the notion of its only a movie is as
much a source of tension as it is relief. If all
perceptions are unreliable and the laws of nature little more than a fictionor, as Nietzsche
put it, everything which is knowable is illusion21is there a difference between reality
and the movies? That this is becoming increasing difficult to answer is, it seems, a true
source of anxiety and horror. s

Andrew Syder is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern Californias School of
Cinema-Television. When not working on his dissertation about 1960s psychedelia, he is an aspiring
digital filmmaker.

NOTES
1
2
3

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review 146 (1984) 60.
Ibid, 65.
David Tepper, Scream 3: The Death of the Postmodern Slasher Pic? Culture Kiosque: The European Guide to Arts,
Culture and Entertainment Worldwide <http://www.culturekiosque.com/nouveau/cinema/rhescream.htm> 21
March 2000 (Accessed 20 July 2002).

AXES TO GRIND

87

KNOWING THE RULES

4

Harvey OBrien, Rev. of Scream 2, Harveys Movie Reviews <http://indigo.ie/~obrienh/scm2.htm> 1998 (Accessed
20 July 2002).
5
Jrgen Habermas, The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point, Postmodernism: A Reader, Thomas
Docherty, ed. (New York; Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1993) 51-61.
6
Cornel West, Nietzsches Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy, Early Postmodernism, Paul Bov, ed.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 265-289.
7
Ibid., 265-66.
8
Gilles Deleuze, The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990) 253-279.
9
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsches
Notebooks of the Early 1870s (New Jersey; London: Humanities Press International, 1979) 84.
10
Ibid., 85.
11
Ibid., 87.
12
Ibid., 80.
13
See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1988) 166-184.
14
Robin Wood, Return of the Repressed, Film Comment 14:4 (1978) 26.
15
Charlene Bunnell, The Gothic, Planks of Reason, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen; London: The Scarecrow Press,
1984) 81.
16
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) 25.
17
Ibid., 82.
18
One could even argue that horror movies dealing with human monsters follow certain rhetorical patterns, given
that most of us have only ever encountered serial killers and their like on a movie screen. That movie serial killers
have acquired certain recognizable characteristics and have even become clichs (e.g. Hannibal Lecter) suggests
that one could draw up a set of rules governing the behavior of serial killers in horror cinema.
19
Several earlier movies do the same for werewolves: in both The Howling (1980) and An American Werewolf in London
(1981), characters turn to The Wolf Man (1940) to figure out the rules pertaining to lycanthropes. Similarly, the
characters in The Return of the Living Dead (1985) rely on their recollections of Night of the Living Dead (1968) to learn
how to kill the brain-eating zombies.
20
In a not dissimilar manner, when watching Van Sants Psycho remake we are continuously encouraged to compare
the film to Hitchcocks version of the same story, revealing Van Sants film to be more concerned with textual
comparisons than the creation of a transparent known world. Every aspect of the film is explicitly placed in
quotation marks.
21
Nietzsche, 97.

88

FALL 2002

Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series: rhetorical figure of evil.
(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

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