The Death of Postmodern Horror

Horror isn’t dead, it’s very much alive and it will stagger on as it always has. In fact, the presence of postmodern shocker-comedies has done little to stop it. Let’s not forget the non-ironic I Know What You Did Last Summer was a result of the new slasher wave set in motion by the self-referential nod-fest that was Scream, as Wes Craven commented when he saw Scary Movie “It was good lesson in how quickly you become obsolete”. Yet, postmodernism is always treated with reverence. How could it not be? It’s ahead of the curve, it’s ahead of you in fact, you and your susceptibility to cave in to time worn moviemaking tropes. That’s until, it becomes a cliché itself. If that’s the case, then what steps in to swipe at an outdated movement which exists to take swipes at worn out tropes?

That’s the conundrum stabbing at the heart of The Cabin in the Woods, a horror pastiche saturated in ironic gestures and indeed swipes at just about every slasher movie since the 70s. The problem isn’t simply that we’ve seen this kind of self-referential movie before. The problem comes in the reputation of the few. Scream’s impact has been virtually seismic in relation to the perception of slasher movie tropes. What more could Cabin possibly offer? Even Joss Whedon’s own Buffy seemed to bleed dry any potential reservoirs to harvest here. The result, the filmmaker’s have devised a convoluted mesh of sarcastic horror paeans and fan-service monster mashes, all taking place in what is little more than a literal trope factory (peopled by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford). The setting is so intentionally self-aware and silly that it deprives the ensuing escapades of any irony themselves.

Without emphasis there cannot be contrast, director Alexander McKendrick once said that “two instances of tension are half as effective as one” and the fatal flaw at the heart of Cabin is sheer overkill. With a scenario like this you can’t engage with a single idea or joke it puts forward because it exists in nothing more than a cartoon. If everything is an ironic gag, then does irony itself even exist anymore? As a result it becomes its own cliché, if a character announces a wish or desire (to see a Merman in the flesh) the chances are he’ll get it before the credits roll. The problem here is that we’re supposed to be lagging behind the ‘post-ness’ of the proceedings, not one step ahead. We’re now conditioned to the tropes of postmodernism, across all genres. Partly because we feel guilty that we bought into classic clichés in the past, but mostly because self-awareness means that we – the audience and indeed the filmmakers – don’t have to become emotionally invested. Before we could separate ourselves from the misery of a teen girl being hacked up by a monster and leer at the spectacle, postmodern horror has detached us from the movie’s events completely. We don’t root for anyone or anything because sympathy ain’t hip. Once again one must stress, how can anything be emphasised if everything around it emphasises itself? To expound, if your painting on a white canvas and you want to draw attention to the colours of your paint, the last colour you are going to use is white.

The nihilistic fan-service spaz attack that is the finale of Cabin is, for all intents and purposes a ‘Mongolian clusterf#C£’. The climatic overload is hinted at when Richard Jenkins’ workie points at a whiteboard which lists every possible movie monster from werewolves, ghosts, robots and even cenobites. The countless beasties are primed and ready to be unleashed upon horny teens. By the end of the movie the dreaded red button is pressed and the ungodly spectres of Gremlins 2 returns to schmuck up the screen. Throw in an oddly non-shocking cameo from Sigourney Weaver (we can assume that Heather Langenkamp and Jamie Lee Curtis were unavailable) and this is no longer satire, it offers nothing reflective of the genre and becomes a circus. It’s at this point that the filmmakers give up on playing with conventions and the film becomes Where’s Wally (Waldo for readers in the US), pop-culture references have become get-out-of-jail-free cards for movies in stuck in stationary. There is no longer anything amusing about pointing to existing icons not just because it’s a pandering exercise used to lure gullible horror buffs into thinking that this is an ‘homage’ (a word that has become increasingly loathsome year on year), because once again it’s a trope of postmodernism. Which of course, lest we forget, is supposed to be above archetypes and cheap clichés.

Yes the world ends. How ironic, it ends because the geek lived. From a postmodern perspective, if this were any kind of satirical statement then what would it be? If horror fails to follow its own conventions it will destroy itself? It’s at this point that postmodern horror is truly D.O.A when it isn’t even savvy enough to recognise that it’s surrendering to the very tropes that it set out to disrupt. So if we’re clever enough to derail self-aware concepts as they themselves have become clichés in their own right, then what replaces postmodernism? If that’s the case, then is a new wave of post-postmodernist horror even possible? Can a self-awareness of self-awareness even be conveyed coherently on film without turning into a talking head show? Can postmodern horror even exist outside of the shadow of worn out horror tropes like ditzy blonde cannon fodder? Torture porn is looking pretty appetising right about now.