When Horror Refuses to Entertain

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Rotten rails. Preacher drag your fish to the screen welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name Every cut, every. [00:00:29] Speaker B: Shadow you dissect hello, everyone, and welcome back to the final girl on 6th Avenue podcast. My name is Carolyn Smith Hillmer. I'm 6th Avenue's very own final Girl, and you have not heard from me in quite some time. And the reason for that is that I have been reimagining what this podcast is going to look like going forward for quite some time, and I needed to take a step away to do exactly that. So we're looking at about one episode a month per month this year. These are going to be a bit longer form and slightly more focused on research and research topics versus individual film reviews. I'll still be doing individual film reviews, of course, because I enjoy them, but it was kind of starting to feel unfulfilling to me to record only that. So we're going to try something different, and hopefully you all enjoy it. For this episode, we're going to be diving into what it means essentially to be elevated horror. Right? Elevated horror is sometimes considered to be like a bad term, a derogatory term, or something that is inaccessible to a lot of audiences, or it's supposed to be, I don't know, pretentious or what have you. So let's go over today what we think elevated horror is and what even is horror in general. And why does it even matter? There's a moment that happens to a lot of people watching certain horror films, and it's the moment when you stop waiting for the scare and you realize that there will be no release, no reversal, no comfort. And what replaces the fear is not adrenaline, it's dread. Not the fear of what will happen, but more the fear that nothing will save you. That's what this episode is about. This episode is about that very feeling. It's about horror films that don't scream or chase or perform. Films that don't care or don't want your pleasure, your applause or your relief. Films that you know sit with you quietly and refuse to allow you a moment of reprieve by looking away. These films are often grouped under the controversial label of elevated horror, which is a term that inspires arguments, defensiveness, eye rolling, sometimes all of those, all at once. So today, I don't actually want to argue with you about whether elevated horror is real or not. I want to ask a different what kind of fear do these films create? And why does it unsettle people so deeply? So, with that in mind, the films I have Selected for us to talk about today are Funny Games, the Piano Teacher, Hereditary Saint Maude, under the Skin, and Possession. A lot of these are films that we've talked about together already. So, you know, if you've been a listener of the show for a little while, you might recognize some of these films. And if you're new here, then hopefully I can entice you to. To take a look at some of these and maybe watch something that you never thought you would watch with those films. We're also going to talk about spectatorship, trauma, repression, grief, taste, and why some horror films feel like accusations rather than entertainment. So for part one, let's talk about what elevated horror even is. What does that mean? The term elevated horror didn't come from academia much to some dismay. It actually came from critics, and especially critics who historically didn't like horror very much. For decades now, horror has been dismissed by critics as exploitative, juvenile, excessive, morally suspect. And yet, something interesting happens when horror films start to resemble tragedy, when they slow down, when they deny pleasure and resolve, when they remove spectacle and center around grief or psychology. Suddenly the language changes, and now the film is cerebral, important, artful, serious, even meditative. And this tells us less about horror and more about cultural permission, really. Film scholar Mark Yankovic writes about horror as a disreputable genre, one that is only granted legitimacy when it distances itself from its own audience. In other words, horror is allowed to be smart as long as it doesn't look like horror. Horror films in the 1950s were more of a critique of American general anxieties like conservatism, mass society, conformity, and the threats of masculinity. But Yankovic examines films such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Creature from the Black Lagoon that still relevantly apply, you know, today to how the genre developed, but really connects those films to how they. And like I said, these elements are still relevant to horror today, but they were really mainly examined when marking the transition from the 1950s and 60s to 1970s and 80s, which was a time of cultural shift, obviously, but was also a time of shift in film. Social development, modernization, social decay, invasion, external forces, suburban gothic, or using otherwise safe environments to showcase violence and being unsafe. And most relevant to our discussion today is the transition away from external monsters and shifts to internal threats. The idea that nature has gone wrong or that psychological instability does exist is largely what defines the horror films that we discuss on this show today and what a lot of horror viewers like to see today. And this is where elevated horror really lives at the intersection of fear and respectability. But horror has always been elevated. Look at Psycho, Rosemary's Baby, don't look now. What changed is not the genre, it's who is allowed to claim it in distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu A distinct theory is proposed. Those that possess more cultural capital, like education, intellect, style of dress, style of speech, etc. Have far more influence in determining what aesthetic values constitute good taste in their society. Their social inequities that have been created by the limitations or lack thereof, such as mental attitude, skills, personal habits, essentially forces the quote unquote lower class, as those with little cultural capital to be the social inferior to that of the ruling class. And those in that lower class, according to this theory, lack the education and cultural knowledge that is necessary to appreciate and enjoy, keyword, enjoy the aesthetic of a work of art. Whereas middle and upper class folk passively take pleasure in consuming art by way of their gaze is thereby forced to accept and all members of the society are required to oblige. And that tension between fear as entertainment and fear as confrontation and what it means to be a horror film at all defines the films that we are going to discuss today. Let's start with horror as an accusation, right? Michael Henneke's Funny Games is one of the most openly hostile films ever made. Not hostile toward its characters, hostile towards you, the viewer. From the beginning, the film strips away everything that horror audiences are trained to expect. There is no build up to catharsis, there's no escalation towards justice. There's no satisfaction. The violence is banal, the suffering is prolonged and the film denies you the relief of spectacle. For those of you that are not familiar with Funny Games, I don't know that this is a film that I recommend you become familiar with because asking someone to watch it is like asking someone to, I don't know, witness an execution. It's really something that morally and ethically I don't know that I can recommend. I do enjoy the film, however. And this film is about a family who are in their lake house when two younger men come in and invite themselves in, forced entry style almost, and they enter the home under false pretenses and things start to go awry and there is prolonged suffering. There is the tension that you could just die from being part of, because you know what's going to happen to this family. You know that this family is going to die. But the director forces you to sit through the entire film just to get what you already know is coming and yet you watch it. And then something worse happens. And the killers look at the camera and acknowledge and address you as the audience. And at that moment, Funny Game stops being a narrative and becomes a confrontation. The director has said that the film is meant to be a punishment for the viewer to expose the contradiction of consuming violence while condemning it. And psychologically, this produces cognitive dissonance, the comfort we feel when our values and our actions collide. You don't want the violence that you're witnessing on screen to continue. Yet here you watch. This is horror as ethical horror. Fear not of death, but of complicity. And unlike slashers, where identification shifts right between victim and survivor, Funny Games traps you in your own awareness. You can't hide behind genre expectations anymore. You are present. And that presence is the whole point. Michael Haneke has a distinct filmmaking philosophy. Cinema should be used as a tool for active provocation rather than passive consumption. He views cinema as the ultimate manipulation medium and believes that those who choose to make films have a moral obligation to use their power of manipulation responsibly. So his films take the anti psychological approach, where character motivations and emotional guidance are completely absent, and therefore do not allow the viewer to dismiss their responsibility and what is taking place on the screen. Even more so when the killers in the film that you just watched are addressing you directly. He believes that violence should never be shown as fun or cathartic because it desensitizes audiences and devalues the life of humans and what it means to be a human to this extent. He actually never shows violence, forcing it to take place off screen, and makes expert use, if I say so myself, of sound, to make the impact more profound and disturbing. It's like, you know, letting your imagination run wild, given the limited input that you're receiving. None of his films coddle the viewer, and he is deeply concerned with how modern media today realizes and derealizes the experience of the real world. So you're probably thinking, this sounds so disturbing. Why would anyone ever watch this guy's movies? Why would anybody be drawn to an entire genre and subgenre of film that is completely centered around negative emotions? And well, Noel Carroll addresses this in the Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. Carroll expresses that the paradox of horror is simply that the genre demands curiosity. More artistic or elevated horror produces genuine emotions based on the idea of a monster rather than an actual monster on the screen. Arthouse horror is a category blending genre that excites the imaginations of an audience, which is further heightened by the emotions of the Viewers. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that ethical horror requires a certain level of empathy and an openness to sit with your own thoughts as to how complicit you were in the actions that took place on screen, even simply by watching a movie. And this feeling only worsens when we examine the Piano Teacher. The Piano Teacher is the perfect example for discomfort without violence. The Piano Teacher is a 2001 film by Our very best friend Michael Henneke. And it's rarely called horror, which is strange because there are few films as psychologically unbearable as this one. It is torturous. There's no monster. There's no threat from the outside. The horror here comes from repression, emotional, sexual and social. Erica is a piano teacher who is being pursued romantically by a young man who eventually becomes a student of hers. And she is described in this film as masochistic. Erika lives in a world of control. Okay, she's a piano teacher. She's a brilliant piano teacher, but in terms of her own life, she really doesn't have one. [00:18:32] Speaker C: She is. [00:18:36] Speaker B: Essentially living under the control of everything in her life. Her mom, her career, her body. Desire here is not expressed. It's punished. And this aligns closely with Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection, which is something I know we've talked about many times, but it still applies. The horror that arises when boundaries collapse and the self becomes unrecognizable is the objection that we are dealing with here. Michael Hanukkah structures Erica and her entire psyche around failed repression and constant proximity to the abject, especially through the body. The maternal bond and sexuality stripped of symbolic mediation. Erica, essentially, in this film, while being pursued romantically by this young man who becomes her student, is not able to interact or engage with this man in a way that we would all perhaps consider perfectly normal. And so, rather than, you know, falling into this romance with, you know, the. The lust. Right. That it would. That typically follow. Erica wants a very specific type of sexual gratification from this young man. And she's so, like, stunted in her growth as an adult and as a person due to all of the controls in her life, that she's not able to communicate verbally with him what it is that would sexually gratify her or what she believes would be sexually gratifying to her. So she writes it in a letter and gives the letter to this man. This man then reads this letter and is disgusted by what he reads because essentially, she's asking for. She's asking for bondage. And a sort of master and slave dynamic, a BDSM dynamic. And this is something that she's never actually done. So she's not certain that this is something that will make her happy, but this is what she believes will make her happy. And she refuses to engage in any other forms of physical intimacy unless it can be exactly this, which angers her pursuer and confuses him in a way. So Kristeva argues that the first and most decisive encounter with abjection is the maternal body. Subjectivity requires separation from the mother. Erica's total and complete enmeshment with her mother throughout the film represents a failed abjection. They share a bed, they share an apartment, they share routines, surveillance. Erica's mom is constantly calling her at places that Erica says she will be or that she thinks Erica might be to see where she is, even though she's a grown adult woman. So Erica has never successfully expelled the maternal body as abject, which allows her mother to police her body, her clothing, her desire, and causes the maternal body here to return not as love, but as control, disgust and suffocation. The mother remains inside Erica's psyche and prevents stable boundaries from forming. She makes comments to Erica about the things that she wears or about her being a whore or, you know, various things. She's essentially created an environment where she would continue to do this, this forever, right? Like Erica seemingly wants to detach herself but doesn't actually take any steps to do so. And the time that she does or she thinks that she is by interacting with this young man who's pursuing her doesn't end well. So it almost like it reinforces her back into this, this cycle, right? Where, where these boundaries will just simply never form. Kristeva also distinguishes between desire structured by language and law, and abject experience which precedes or destroys symbolization. Erika's sexuality is notably pre symbolic and pre relations, right? Because it's not been engaged in and surfaces as voyeurism and self mutilation and fixation on bodily injury to bypass erotic reciprocity. Her actions don't aim to pleasure, but rather to push the body to the limit of pain and blood and exposure. Erica will go to a sex shop and rent a room to watch a porn film. She is shown taking a razor blade and like slicing the insides of her thigh, inner thigh and vaginal area to bleed. She wants or believes so deeply that she will receive this sexual gratification by means of having, you know, this man choose what she wears every day and tying her up and locking her in a room without a key where she can't get out, or things of that nature, but not actual, like penetrative sex. These are all things that she thinks will bring her this gratification or are what this gratification should look like almost. She doesn't even entertain the fact or the idea that you can be physically intimate with someone without them hurting you, but because this is sort of all she knows in her life that she lives in, under the control of her mother and of everything else in her life that she deems controlling to her that this is only. This is the only option. And so to Erica, the body is not a sight of meaning or intimacy, but it's a body that leaks and bleeds and. And can be violated. And psychic collapse illustrates itself in many ways throughout this film. But abjection makes a logical return in this film in what I consider to be the climax where this young man actually rapes Erica in her home. And it is the second longest rape scene that I've seen, other than second only, to irreversible. And I do think that there, to a certain level, any rape scene shown on screen is not necessary. But I also understand that with certain directors, like Gaspar Noah and like Michael Henneke, he's forcing you to take ownership of your role in viewing this, and also for you to feel complicit in what's taking place. You know, you're watching this woman be raped, but you're not doing anything to stop it. All of his films are aimed at what you're supposed to feel or what he wants you to feel. And in this particular scene, I don't feel that he wants me to be empathetic to what is happening to Erica on the screen. It feels like he wants me to feel like I'm taking part in this. And for whatever reason that may be, I don't know, but that's the way that it's shot. Versus when you watch the rape scene in Irreversible by Gaspar Noah, it. You feel nothing but empathy for that woman. It's not shown in the same way. And I don't know which feeling is harder to sit with. Both are, to me, incredibly disturbing and gut wrenching and in different ways. But when this man assaults Erica in her home, her mother is there. He locked her in a room and she couldn't escape. And so she. She listened to this whole thing take place. And his violence is not erotic. It is empty and humiliating and brutal, which mirrors Erica's internal landscape. And when abjection is not contained. It leads to the annihilation of meaning rather than leading to transgression. So nothing explodes, nothing resolves. There's no monster. The film denies transformation entirely, and instead it escalates inward. Erica goes to a recital where she is to perform and a piece right on the piano. And this man, the very day before, had been in her home raping her, and appears at this recital with his parents and walks by and says, good luck to her, as if this is a normal day for him. And after he walks away, she takes a knife and she stabs herself in the chest and then leaves the concert hall entirely. So I. We don't know what happens at the end. We have no idea what happens to Erica. And that's what makes this existential horror. It's not the fear of dying, but the fear of continuing to live life. What makes the Piano Teacher essential to Elevated Horror discussions is that it exposes how arbitrary the genre boundaries really are. And you know, what if it marketed itself differently? What if the same themes were framed through violence or the supernatural? It would be shelved as a horror film immediately. But instead we call this Art House, which raises the question, how much horror goes unrecognized simply because it refuses the spectacle. Let's transition a little bit away, particularly from Michael Henneke, because I'm sure we all need a break now. Let's talk about the film that really broke through and became the first to really shine as being labeled Elevated Horror. Let's talk about Hereditary. Hereditary is trauma that you simply cannot escape. It's often described as a possession film, but that's a misdirection, and I believe that Ari Aster would agree with you. The real horror of Hereditary is the grief before anything supernatural even appears. The film is already devastating. There's the dinner scene where Toni Collette freaks out at her, her son. The silence after the accident where, you know, Peter comes home and he goes to bed, or he lays down, he doesn't sleep, and waits for his own mother to find his little sister's beheaded corpse in the backseat of her car. The rawness of Toni Collette's performance, Right? This whole film operates through trauma theory. And trauma is not linear. It repeats, it infects, it passes down. Freud called this repetition compulsion, which is the mind's tendency to reenact trauma rather than resolve it. We are familiar with Freud's pleasure principle, but he introduces beyond the pleasure principle to explain phenomena that do not conform to the pleasure principle. Core ideas include repetition, compulsion, trauma and unbinding, which Is when trauma overwhelms the psyche's ability to bind experience to meaning and returns raw and unprocessed. Repetition rather than understanding. And the death drive, which is an unconscious pull toward destruction or inorganic stillness. And the dissolution of the self working silently through repetition, self sabotage and aggression turned inward. We can see some of this when we think of Erika, right from the piano teacher. Her life is always the same. She wakes up every day. She goes to work. She teaches. She does some form of, you know, promiscuous activity or sexually gratifying behavior for herself and goes to bed with her mother every night. And she sabotages herself. And her aggression at the end of the film is not aimed at the man who raped her, but is actually turned inward on herself when she stabs herself in the chest. And Hereditary is structured almost entirely around inescapable repetition. There is a trauma that cannot be worked through, which is experienced through a series of shocks. Right? We have the death of Annie's mother at the beginning of the film. Followed by the car incident where her child is beheaded, followed by the discovery of her daughter's beheaded body. And Peter's guilt over the incident and the psychic collapse. And instead of working through these events, Annie compulsively recreates her trauma through her miniature works. She's supposed to be working on those for, like, a collection for a museum or an art. You know, art gallery. But instead, she. She builds these scenes of these traumas and these events, which she thinks is, like, understanding or processing, but it's not, right. Peter dissociates and becomes a passive site for repetition. And the family continues to reenact loss rather than mourning it. Annie's miniatures simply memorialize or freeze the traumas that she's experienced physically. Like she can see them every day, but instead, you know, of providing the symbolic control that Annie believes that recreating these scenes does for her. All she's doing is compulsively repeating these memories and not processing any of them. And this is even more prominent when you think of her, you know, going to Joan's house and trying to conduct a seance with her family. It's like instead of just sitting with the fact that all these things happened. And just allowing yourself to feel the way that you feel about it. She continuously, like, enforces the destruction of her family through all of these behaviors. The death drive is mainly presented throughout the film. And ultimately demonstrated as the annihilation of the family altogether. It's the structural metaphor rather than a supernatural twist like we would expect or might Expect, or potentially did expect on a first time watch. Individual desire is irrelevant here. And each generation reenacts the same destructive pattern. Annie's mom was not particularly kind to her due to, you know, some, some grief in her own life. And now Annie is recreating the same thing within her own family unit by refusing to confront this grief and this trauma and would rather make everyone else suffer essentially with her. And it, you know, it showcases that each generation has the same destructive pattern. And it illustrates further that the death drive is beneath conscious consciousness. It overrides pleasure, it overrides self preservation, and it's fundamentally anti individual. She believes that what she's doing is really only for her. She's conducting the seance for her. She's doing, you know, these. Recreating these scenes of these traumas with her miniatures for her. But it's not only her that is suffering because of this. There's no pleasure, there's no meaning, there's no escape. This film is especially Freudian in its refusal of moral order or psychological growth or any form of narrative healing. The suffering here is structural, not situational. But is trauma a single psychic mechanism like the death drive? Or is it a more historically produced, culturally mediated problem? Roger Lockharts examines this explicitly in the trauma question. Hereditary is more than a Freudian horror. It is a late modern trauma narrative obscurity obsessed with transmission and belatedness and failure of testimony. And Luckhurst claims that trauma is not just what happened, but what cannot fully be told. Enormous emphasis is placed on speech, witnessing and failed narration, all of which collapse in this film. And you know, speech that does not heal only circulates the trauma. There is no time in the film where, you know, the family sits together and they discuss, I don't know, the death of Charlie, right, Annie's daughter. They never talk about it. Nobody talks about anything. And she, she brings it up at one point in the, the infamous dinner scene and the one in which she tells her son, the fucking face on your face. She brings up the fact that nobody's talking, but nobody makes an effort to talk. And she certainly doesn't create an opening environment for anyone to talk, especially not to her. And so none of the speech that is. And dialogue that is, you know, heard throughout the film, like none of it provides any healing or any clarity to anyone. It just continues to recirculate the traumas that they've already experienced. And most notably applicable here from Lockhart's writing is the deferred shock rather than the immediate reaction. Right? Like, yes, you can see in here, here mainly the immediate reaction of Annie finding Charlie's body in the car. But the shock really doesn't come to everyone else until much later. And the family unit is shown as a trauma machine. In hereditary trauma, inheritance is unavoidable. It's emotional and genetic and supernatural. And whether or not this was imposed on them or aided by Annie's apparent desire to communicate with the dead is up for debate. But the demon doesn't arrive to disrupt the order. It arrives because order was never actually there at the end. You feel, when Peter is crowned as. As the king, it sort of is the only time in the film where you feel like you can take a deep breath because you know that order has been established now. They found a vessel for this person or for this. This otherworldly being to inhabit a person and provide the order that they're seeking. This is cosmic horror without awe. There's no meaning. There is only inevitability. We know what's going to happen at the end of the film. We know that the family is going to be annihilated. And we know that all of the things that take place in this film were predetermined by the cult that Annie's mother engaged with. And yet critics embraced this film wholeheartedly. And why? It's because it performs seriousness in recognizable ways. Prestige acting, slower pacing, very artistic framing. Right. The cinematography will blow you away if you've never seen this film and it speaks to the language. Legitimacy. Okay, let's move on to something more uplifting. [00:44:55] Speaker C: I'm being facetious. Psychological possession and the collapse of meaning. If the earlier films in this episode explore repression, trauma, or inherited grief, possession. [00:45:08] Speaker B: Represents the point at which psychological language itself stops working. [00:45:14] Speaker C: There is no metaphor stable enough to hold what this film is doing. We've talked about possession on this show before. It is a 1981 film directed by Andre Zawalski. It's sort of about a spy and his wife. And then, you know, she asks for a divorce. But then after that, her behavior is honestly bizarre and pretty disturbing. And it was actually filmed in West Berlin. So, you know, that's a whole history line in and of itself. But it is the only English language film from this director, and it did premiere at Cannes. So just in case, you know, you haven't. You're not intimately familiar with this movie and you haven't maybe listened to my previous episode about it, there's a little bit of backstory for you. It's not. This was not a commercially successful film in Europe or in the United States, for that matter. But in recent years, it has sort of developed more positive reception. I guess people think of it positively now. They didn't really think positively of it when it came out. But possession is not about a marriage ending. It's not about infidelity. It's not even about madness. It's about what happens when identity loses its organizing center. From a psychoanalytic perspective, possession stages what many theorists describe as ego disintegration, which is essentially a collapse of the structures that allow the self to maintain coherence in relation to others. So Anna, right, the wife, she doesn't descend into madness. She splinters. Her body becomes the site where meaning fails. Screaming, convulsing, leaking, fragmenting. These moments in the film are not symbolic flourishes. It's theoretically aggressive. This film refuses diagnostic clarity altogether. There's no narrative reassurance. There's no allegorical containment. The creature that Anna has as her side piece essentially is almost completely beside the point, right? The creature in the film is something that you hear about all along. And she, you know, he suspects that she's cheating, and he's not really sure, like, with who or how or where. But inevitably, right? We are exposed to a monster, and in the end, this quote unquote monster is depicted as Mark, the husband's doppelganger. So do with that what you will, but what matters is that the emotional rupture that's taking place has become ontological. Anna as the self can no longer distinguish inside from outside, or love from annihilation or desire from obliteration. And in this sense, possession operates sort of like a secular version or depiction of religious possession. Not like the belief in God, but belief in the other, the belief that any person can complete, stabilize or justify the self. And when that belief falls, horror rushes in to fill the vacuum in the divided self. By R.D. lang, Ontological Insecurity, or a condition in which the self does not feel real, continuous or safely bounded, is the focus. So within this framework, of this ontological insecurity, to survive, the subject splits into true self versus false self, inner self versus embodied self, and ultimately self versus other. And this division is not initially pathological. It's actually a defense strategy against annihilation, implosion, engulfment. Lang argues that madness is often a failed solution to an impossible situation rather than an inherent illness. Key fears within this framework are engulfment, right, or being absorbed by another implosion, which here would be like the collapse of the self inward and petrification, or being Turned into an object of sorts. So possession takes this concept one step further. Further and externalizes it into flesh and space and violence. And Anna is the ontologically insecure subject. She cannot remain a unified subject within her marriage or motherhood or even sexual relations. Right? So intimacy for her produces this sort of engulfment. It doesn't produce safety for her. And when, you know, withdrawal produces implosion and not freedom. That's where we get Anna. And the best, you know, scene in this film, and I'm not saying best because of the content. I'm saying best because of the acting. And the way that this shot is framed is the one where she has a miscarriage in the subway station. She's, like, running through the station and, you know, keeling over in pain. And she's screaming and she's crying and she's hysterical. And that stages the collapse of the embodied self. So we actually get to see it. And when the self can't live in the world, it retreats inward. And that constructs a hidden, unembodied, true self. And that hidden self becomes liberalized. Here, the creature that she sneaks off with to be with is secret and protected and fed. And it exists outside of social relations and language and law and evolves toward a perfected double of her husband, Mark. The monster is Anna's attempt to create a relationship without engulfment, to be with a lover who does not objectify her or demand coherence from her, like Mark often tells her. Like he doesn't understand her and he doesn't understand why she's doing all these things. And, you know, it's for her. She doesn't want to be coherent. She doesn't want to stabilize her identity. And she certainly doesn't want to be objectified. And she's not by this monster. And that's why possession belongs alongside the piano teacher and hereditary rather than conventional supernatural horror. Because there's no salvation or exorcism here. There's substitution, there's escalation and there's doubling. But by the film's end, identity hasn't been restored, it's been replaced. That replacement is not your resolution. That replacement is your catastrophe. And possession shows us that the most terrifying horror is not being taken over by something supernatural like in religious possession. It's actually discovering that the self was never stable enough to survive intimacy in the first place. So I know what you're thinking. [00:55:21] Speaker B: You're like, Carolyn, you've proven your point. [00:55:23] Speaker C: I get it, blah, blah, blah. But we would be remiss to not address the final topic of duration and alienation and phenomenological horror by talking about under the Skin. We've also talked about under the Skin on this show before. So. But for those of you who either need a refresher or haven't listened to that episode, under the Skin is actually a sci fi. But I find it pretty scary. It was directed by Jonathan Glazer, who we love. It was actually based on a novel. And what I find interesting about this film for me personally is that I actually like Scarlett Johansson's performance, which is something that for those of you that know me in the real world, you've probably never heard me say that. This film is the exception and not the rule. So Scarlett Johansson in this movie is a. She's an extraterrestrial, but she's disguised herself as a human and she's preying on men who are alone during the evening hours of Scotland. Okay, so you're probably like, wow, that sounds kind of boring. It's not not boring. Jonathan Glazer actually developed this over a decade. And at first it was supposed to be this like super heavy on effects sci fi film. And then it became more focusing on the human condition and what that looks like from the. Perception through the eyes of an alien. And so if most horror films rely on escalation, under the Skin does something completely, fundamentally different. There's no loud sounds or like super fast effects. And even the kill count, like the body count is not very high. Everything is really slowed down. So much so that for many viewers, this film seems to barely move at all. But that's not an accident. This is horror. And horror doesn't do things by accident, except for if you're in hereditary. And there's that one scene that somehow made it through the final cut where Joan's voice is heard, but her lips are like not moving. That's a one off, obviously. And we still love Ari Aster, so we're not going to focus too much on that. This is horror that unfolds through time instead of unfolding through like on screen events. So under the Skin operates less like a narrative film and more like a sensory experience. There is a plot, it does exist, but it's skeletal in nature. Right. There's a character, there's a main character and she exists, but she's opaque and there's motivation, like she's doing things for a reason. But that's never explained to us. So instead this film asks a different question entirely. It asks what happens when horror is experienced not as Fear, but as a duration from a phenomenological perspective, or, you know, the standpoint of how a body experiences time and space under the skin produces dread by ultimately refusing to guide the viewer emotionally. There's no score, so we don't really know how we're supposed to feel based on, like, cues from the sound. There's really no exposition that tells us what to think. There's really no catharsis when it's over. And long stretches of this film are spent by, like, simply watching. What adds to this, right, is that a lot of these scenes were filmed on a hidden cameras. Like, on hidden cameras that were placed, like, throughout the set or whatever. So that even adds more to, like, this weird, like, voyeuristic experience that we're having. And so you're watching these faces and these bodies as they move through space, but really, essentially, you're watching nothing happen at all, right? And for some people, that's gonna be something that they don't ever want to experience. I happen to appreciate it. I like films where, honestly, there's not a lot happening on the screen. I want to think about what I just watched. I don't really want you to hand it to me, especially something as visually appealing as under the Skin. It's beautiful to watch, truly. [01:01:25] Speaker B: But. [01:01:28] Speaker C: This sort of, like. [01:01:31] Speaker B: Concept of. [01:01:33] Speaker C: Watching something but you're really watching nothing is not like a new. A new thing or a new style of film, right? A lot of times in documentaries, and I guess really a better example is in ethnography, in ethnographies, you're really not watching anything happen. Nothing is staged for you. You're just sort of watching people or watching things as they just kind of move. But there's not like a plot device or anything that kind of guides you along the way. [01:02:16] Speaker B: And this, you know, concept kind of. [01:02:18] Speaker C: Aligns with what film theorist Vivian Strobach describes as embodied spectatorship, which is the idea that cinema is not just seen, but it's something that you can actually feel. So the discomfort of under the Skin doesn't actually come from what we see, because you're really not seeing very much. It comes from how long we're forced to sit with it. If you're looking for another example of film that does this, there was a film that I talked about that I saw at Sundance last year called April. And April is about a physician in rural Georgia, the country, not the state. And there's a scene in particular where she performs an abortion on a young, young girl. And the scene. [01:03:25] Speaker B: Is so long that It's. [01:03:29] Speaker C: It becomes, like, less about what's happening. [01:03:33] Speaker B: And more about how long it goes on for. [01:03:38] Speaker C: And it doesn't appear to be intentionally elongated, but it feels that way. So in under the Skin, there's these infamous. We'll call them like, void sequences. And that's where, you know, the bodies of these men sink soundlessly into just blackness. Like, they're not framed. These men that she's preying on are not framed in these scenes as being violent spectacles. It's sort of stripped of urgency and reaction, and it's more procedural. And that procedural quality is what makes them so disturbing. Like, you're just watching this person with no sound sink into blackness. So there's no struggle, right? There's no, like, path to escape. There's no, like, emotional release here. And there's no lessons, like, morally. It's just the continuation of time passing. And this is where under the Skin connects to slow cinema more broadly. [01:05:02] Speaker B: Again, not everybody's taste, but slow cinema. [01:05:06] Speaker C: Is a mode of filmmaking that uses duration as a psychological weapon. So our human impatience becomes part of the experience. [01:05:21] Speaker B: And so the longer we wait for. [01:05:23] Speaker C: Something to happen, the more we become aware of the fact that we're waiting and how long we've been waiting for. Our frustration from that becomes part of the horror. And crucially, this film denies us access to interiority altogether. We have no idea what Scarlett Johansson's character feels. We don't even know if she feels at all. We have no idea. So the horror isn't that she lacks humanity, even though we know she's an alien. [01:06:04] Speaker B: The horror is that we keep trying. [01:06:06] Speaker C: To project humanity onto something that doesn't need it. So in this way, the film becomes existential horror in its purest form. And that's not the fear of death or violence or of, you know, an ultimate, definitive end. It's actually the fear of cosmic indifference in that sense, that empathy and meaning and connection are not guaranteed by the universe. They're actually fragile human constructs. Right? The universe doesn't give a fuck if you are sad. Right? The planets still rotate, the stars still do whatever it is they do up there. The sun still rises in our night, in our sky, after, you know, the moon sets. And, like, it's. It's just this thing that will never stop. Well, sorry, it will stop. And if you want to read more about existential horror, I urge you to take a gander on the. The timeline of the far future and you will be sufficiently existentially horrified. And that's a topic for another day. But whether or not there's death or violence, like, that doesn't matter. Everything's still gonna happen the same way. It always happens. And so for us as an audience, that's really hard for us to grasp, but, like, that's because we're trying to project this humanity onto an alien. And really, they're just our own human constructs, and they don't really apply to her. Just because she presents herself as a human doesn't mean she is one. And so, once again, horror refuses to soothe us, and it leaves us alone with time. Now that I think that you've sufficiently gotten the point of what I'm trying to tell you, right, let's talk about why this horror divides audiences. And not in the way that. Not in the way that we talked about earlier, where it's like, oh, well, like, you know, this class of people has taste, and they get to decide culturally what is tasteful and what is art. I mean, like, genuinely, like, why. [01:08:58] Speaker B: Do. [01:08:58] Speaker C: People have this, like, personal investment into horror? I think I've successfully also argued my point to you that there are things within these types of horror films that are scary and can be scary to sit with. It just really depends on how long you're willing to sit with it and. [01:09:23] Speaker B: How much attention you're. [01:09:26] Speaker C: You're willing to give it. But I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss, quote, unquote, elevated or art house horror as something that's not horror. I think it's just. That's what we've termed it. And I understand the negative context and connotation of this term, but I don't think it needs to have this connotation. I don't really think that. I don't think there's anything dirty about it. Right. If you ask me. Right. I'm 29, so when I grew up watching horror films, I started with things like. I didn't start with anything new. I started with things like Halloween and Friday the 13th and signs. Right? Things that, like, everything is shown to you on the screen and there's always something, for the most part, good, that happens at the end. Which is a very successful formula, I guess you could say, for film. Right. It's effective. [01:10:46] Speaker B: It works. [01:10:47] Speaker C: People like superhero movies because. Or Marvel movies because, like, the good guy wins at the end. And like, yeah, audiences want the good guy to win. It makes them happy. These directors in these films today don't give a flying fuck if you are happy at the end of their movie. And that is just as scary to Me as watching a man drown in blendered pig fluid in Saw three. So I don't. I don't agree that elevated horror is dirty or negative or, like, inaccessible. Everyone has fears that don't have anything. [01:11:45] Speaker B: To do with. [01:11:48] Speaker C: Jason coming into your cabin. Right? Everybody has these fears intrinsically. They just don't care to explain it a lot of the time. Because why would that come up with. Why would that come up in conversation ever? It wouldn't. So I don't think that this is like a high class type of classification for a film. I think it's just a different type of film. I don't think that means it's inaccessible. And I don't think it means that you have to be of a certain class to like it or appreciate it. You could argue that I. Right, like elevated horror. So that means that I'm in the upper class. But then how do you explain the fact that I like the Saw series or that I like the Ring or that I love Silent Hill? Right? You wouldn't be able to. [01:12:50] Speaker B: To. [01:12:52] Speaker C: You wouldn't be able to explain that to me because they're not exclusive. Like, it doesn't matter. So at this point, I think it's worth asking the question, why do films like Funny Games and the Piano Teacher and Hereditary and Possession and Under the Skin, all the films that we've talked about today inspire such intense. [01:13:21] Speaker B: Backlash? [01:13:24] Speaker C: Not dislike. I'm talking anger. And I think it's because the division around elevated or psychological horror is not really about the scares, it's about expectation. Because traditionally, horror, like I said, makes a promise to its audience. That promise is going to be release and justice, and the Final Girl is gonna survive. And at the very least, there's gonna be some meaning and it's gonna be spelled out for you. And these films break that promise altogether. They don't scare and then resolve, they just withhold. So there's no explanation, there's no reassurance. There's hell. Half the time there's not even a winner. And for a lot of viewers and audiences, that refusal to obey by this formula feels like a betrayal. Going back to Mark Yankovic, he notes that horror audiences often have deeply personal investments in what they feel like the genre is supposed to provide to them. Horror isn't just entertainment. It's identity and community and ritual and a formula. And so when a film enters the genre and refuses to play by the house rules, it doesn't just disappoint, it actually threatens ownership. And this is why elevated horror is so often accused of being pretentious and boring and fake or not scary. And these criticisms aren't even wrong in the technical sense. They are emotional responses to an implied breach of contract between filmmakers and audiences. And mainstream horror says, please come and suffer. You're going to be rewarded at the end. But these films say, you're going to suffer, period. There's no prize at the end. There's no moral sorting. There's no final girl. There's no order restoration. There's no peace in the community. There's, you know, no setting Freddy on fire again so your dreams are safe. There's annihilation and substitution and silence and ambiguity. And ambiguity is deeply threatening. [01:16:12] Speaker B: Psychologically. [01:16:14] Speaker C: Ambiguity removes control and prevents mastery. You can't solve funny games. You can't diagnose possession. You can't break the cycle of hereditary. And you can't emotionally decode under the skin, which means the viewer is not able to stand outside of the experience. You're trapped in the experience. It feels unresolved. And that's why these films are often labeled art horror or prestige horror, because those labels create distance instead of just labeling it that. Wouldn't it be so much easier in life if people just said, oh, these. [01:17:02] Speaker B: Are all horror films. [01:17:03] Speaker C: They're just different kinds. These belong in the horror genre. They're not a different genre. The distance that these labels create allow viewers to reject films, like, not even on emotional grounds, but, like, on cultural ones. They'll say, it's not for me, or it's not real horror, or it's trying too hard. But what these reactions reveal is something even more fundamental, which is that these films don't fail to entertain. They fail to provide comfort. And for some viewers, that is unacceptable. I understand that. There's nothing wrong with that. What I do think is wrong is for people to say, well, there's no comfort at the end of that film. So it was trying too hard. And if you liked that film, then maybe there's something wrong with you or you're not really in our community of, you know, horror genre lovers because you like that film and I don't. Ambiguity is scary. It's supposed to be. That's the whole fucking point. So, quote, unquote, elevated horror exposes a hard truth about the genre itself. Horror isn't just about fear. It's about what kind of fear we're willing to tolerate. Yes, some people are scared that they're. [01:18:48] Speaker B: Gonna have a nightmare. [01:18:50] Speaker C: Okay, Nightmare on Elm Street. Very effective for those people. Some people are afraid of. I don't Know, a little boy drowning in the lake at a summer camp and coming back to kill you. I'm not afraid of those things. What I am afraid of is Scarlett Johansson's character. And under the skin, okay, I'm terrified of the two boys in Funny Games. So there's all these different types of fear. What kind of fear are we willing to tolerate? Are we willing to tolerate fear with meaning or resolution? Fear that ends exactly where it began. Unresolved, uninterpreted, indifferent. Right? [01:19:42] Speaker B: Like, that's the divide. [01:19:45] Speaker C: And that's why these films linger with you so long after the credits roll. It's not because they scared you. It's because they refused to let you leave the theater. Thank you all so much for listening. I know that you are probably thinking that this episode is wildly different than. [01:20:11] Speaker B: Things that I've done in the past. [01:20:12] Speaker C: And you are not wrong. But with all that to say, I really hope that you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed making it. This is a new format for the show, so I would really love it if, you know, you. You left me some feedback. You can email me, you can message me on Instagram, any of the things, right? I would love to hear from you. [01:20:40] Speaker B: I would love to hear what you have to say and what you think. [01:20:45] Speaker C: I can't let you go, of course, without telling you that the final girl on 6th Avenue is part of the Morbidly Beautiful network. And Morbidly Beautiful is your home for horror. So if you love horror in any way, shape or form, then you are welcome with us and our community. At morbidlybeautiful.com you can find my podcast and many others like it and insightful film reviews and fun articles and so much more. So please go to morbidlybeautiful.com and show us some love. You can find this podcast on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music here. If you enjoyed the show, it would mean the world to me if you left me a five star review and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. For questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, requests or feedback, you can email [email protected] or send me a message on Instagram FinalGirl on 6. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you enjoyed this. I'm a bit nervous, but never Forget that I'm 6th Avenue's very own Final Girl. Bye. [01:21:52] Speaker A: Drag your face to the scre welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name Every cut, every shadow you dissect the dark and flame.