Steven Schneider’s “Monsters as Uncanny Metaphors” talks about the monsters in horror films and aims to explain why these characters are capable of evoking strong emotions from audiences. Horror movie viewers can be truly appalled and petrified by these monster they see on screen, while knowing fully well that these monster are purely fictional. This phenomenon whereby horror movies can stimulate strong emotional responses from the audience can be clearly observed in a movie like “Funny Games” directed by Michael Haneke. This was achieved through the use of concepts like the return of the repressed and the reconfirmation of the surmounted.
In “Funny Games,” a family of three gets attacked by two men with golf clubs. The idea of two men with two golf clubs is not something one would normally consider to be utterly terrifying in any way. It is the mannerism of these serial killers breaking the fourth wall and the level of realism they had, is what made this movie horrifying. Even though some of the violence in this film is done off screen, this shows that films can still be horrifying without an absurd level of gore.
Robin Wood’s “American Nightmare” touches upon the ideas of the return of the repressed and how they are usually expressed in horror movies. Schneider explains that most audiences are truly horrified mainly because of their own repressed thoughts and ideas formed during early childhood that have long been abandoned. Schneider states that horror movies truly shocks the viewers because of the following reasons “(1) paradigmatic horror narratives work by reconfirming for audiences infantile beliefs that were abandoned long ago...(2) Horror films are best understood as metaphorical embodiments of such narratives... (3) These metaphorical embodiments are conceptual not merely cinematographic... (4) Although the metaphorical nature of horror film monsters is psychologically necessary, their surface heterogeneity is historically and contingent”. (Schneider 169) Schneider is trying to illustrate that films like Funny Games play on this concept of the repressed, which is closely related to the idea of the uncanny. At a very young age, humans form ideas some of which can be terrifying to a child, but somewhere along on the path to maturity, the ideas get repressed and forgotten. Horror movies make the audiences revisit those suppressed thoughts and fears, which can give one the feeling of “uncanniness” (Schneider 168). Horror movies monsters are terrifying because they are “metaphorical embodiments” of these monsters. Although they’re on the screen, they are very real in the minds of the audience. For example, this makes it understandable for audiences to be emotionally disturbed as they watched Paul and Peter, the serial killers, while they continuously torture the innocuous family of three.
Monsters in films are modified as time changes in terms of technological advances and “the political, racial, religious and sexual dimensions of society” (Schneider 170) in a manner similar to gentrification (Altman 68), whereby genres are in a continuous process of cycle creation in order to attract movie goers. Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of changes in the horror genre like multiple rendition of the same monsters, that audiences have gotten used to and can no longer evoke strong emotional reactions. This is where movies like “Funny Games” come in. “Funny Games” was horrifying because of its simplicity and realism which relates closely to the uncanny. Peter and Paul are monsters in their own right but they also vary drastically when compared to other monsters in films like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Cabin in the Woods. The entrance of the serial killers into the home of the victims contributes greatly to the emotional reactions that are generated by the audience as it was very naturalistic and the fact that it could happen to anyone made it much more horrifying. Anyone watching Bram Stoker’s Dracula can still have some level of emotional response, but the movie is about a vampire, a fictional creature. This is weak compared to the possibility of a next door neighbor intruding and attacking one’s family as it is a much more terrifying thought and therefore evokes a stronger emotional reaction. Peter and Paul are “the reconfirmation of other surmounted” (Schneider 172 ), Freud’s second class of uncanny is sometimes described as feeling alien and familiar at the same time. The uncanny gives one the feeling of its familiarity, as it was conceived during childhood, but the depicted reality of these thoughts on screen gives us the unmistakable feeling of its strangeness as it has forgotten for a very long time.
Most, if not all horror films play on the concepts of “returned of the repressed” and “the reconfirmation of the surmounted”, as both classes are under the idea of uncanniness. The artistic representation of these repressed thoughts and ideas on screen make the horror genre very effective as a medium for its audience to express and experience their social-cultural fears in a relatively safe manner. The repressed returning in horror movies and the reconfirmation of the surmounted is what makes the horror genre great. Audiences experiencing the concept of the uncanny always have strong emotional responses regardless of whether the events they are witnessing are fictional or real.
Works Cited
Altman, Rick. “”Genrification.” Film/Genre. British Film Institute, May 1, 1999. 62-68. Print
Schneider, Steven. “Monster as (uncanny) metaphors: Freud, Lakeoff, and the representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror” New York: Limelight Editions, 2000. 167-191. Print.
Wood, Robin. "The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s" (1979): 25-32. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment