If youre studying for AQAs A2 Mest3,

you may be researching your own

case study on media representation,
focusing on media theories and
debates and wider contexts. Here
examiner Steph Hendry shows you
how to explore the social and cultural
contexts of one of our most enduring
genres: horror.
The horror genre is one of the medias most
successful genres. Since Le Manoir du Diable
(Mlis, 1896), stories that aim to scare their
audience have proved immensely popular. Daniel
Cohen observes that:
cultures create and ascribe meaning
to monsters, endowing them with
characteristics derived from their most deep-
seated fears and taboos
An analysis of horror monsters in the light of
their cultural contexts can, therefore, give an
insight into the anxieties and concerns of the
contemporary culture. Of course, not all people
have the same worries at any given time, but
it is possible to identify general cultural and
contextual trends through the monsters created
for horror texts.
Pre-World War 2
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) has been a major
influence on representations of vampires since
its creation in Germany shortly after WW1.
The vampire is an invader; he comes from
elsewhere and brings pestilence to the local
community. His method of attack involves
penetration and the exchange of bodily fluids.
This can be read as a sexual metaphor but
significantly the outcome of a vampire attack is
death or infection. At the time Nosferatu was
released, Germany was economically and socially
devastated after WW1. Poverty and disease was
rife and in 1918 hundreds of thousands of people
died during a flu pandemic. The vampire Count
Orlok is rat-like in appearance and it is perhaps
not surprising that a culture that had suffered
at the hands of expansionist politicians and was
now vulnerable to disease would respond to a
monster that represented invasion and infection.
Many horror texts between the wars reflected
the social changes in terms of power, authority
and class that followed the political upheaval of
WW1. Both Nosferatu and Dracula (Browning,
1931) featured a corrupt and abusive
aristocratic class who are the sources of horror.
In Frankenstein (Whale, 1932) the aristocratic
class was also criticised. In the film, the son
of Baron Frankenstein turns his back on his
aristocratic duty and locks himself away to create
life in the form of the monster. Dr Frankenstein
takes on a god-like role in the act of creation, but
he oversteps his social position. The film shows
that he needs to return to his predetermined
aristocratic role to help protect the village from
the horror he has unleashed. Frankenstein was
released during the Great Depression, a time
of great financial hardship across the Western
world where unemployment and poverty was
widespread. The Russian Revolution showed
one response to weak or corrupt governance and
mass poverty a workers revolt something
Western authorities feared. Dr Frankensteins
return to his rightful position allows him to lead
and control the village population whose fear
and anger can be directed at the monster instead
of the ruling class.
Frankenstein has many other possible
readings that relate to the context of the time. For
example, the sympathetic representation of the
monster could be read as a critical perspective
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on the racial tensions that were present in
American culture at the time. The monsters
eventual death is represented as a mob lynching
of an individual who cannot integrate into the
dominant culture. The monster himself is not as
monstrous as the abuse of scientific knowledge
that creates him, the aristocrats abuse of power,
or the mindless, murderous mob.
Post-WW2 films maintained the focus on
monsters that invaded or infected, and the
science gone wrong motif expanded across
both horror and science-fiction. Perhaps this is
unsurprising considering the horrors witnessed in
the advances in military capabilities, culminating
in the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
in 1945. Add to this the depths of human cruelty
seen in the holocaust; and its all too clear
that mankind had shown itself to have the
potential to be monstrous. Horror movies soon
reflected this.
The Not So Swinging 60s
The 1960s was a time of social change and
this was mirrored in its horror monsters. The
decade begins with Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
reflecting the impact of Freudian theories
on the cultures understanding of the human
psyche. The monster here is a man whose family
dynamics created an abnormal psychology. In
the UK a similar story was told in Peeping Tom
(Powell, 1960) where a dysfunctional family
created another human monster. The monsters
in both films were, on the surface, normal people
but they brought horror close to home for the
1960s audience. Arguably the mundane settings
make the horror more effective than the distant,
fantastical horror of the previous decades and the
fact that the monsters now look like us creates
an unsettling realism.
By the end of the decade horror was reflecting
some of the enormous social and cultural
changes that had taken place. At the start of the
decade attitudes to race meant it would have
been unthinkable to have had a black male lead
in an American film but this occurred in Night of
the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) which also used
vivid and visceral representations of violence,
making Psycho look quite tame. The optimism
of the Summer of Love that is often associated
with this period was in fact tempered by the
assassinations first of President Kennedy
in 1963, and later of his brother Robert and
Martin Luther King in 1968. America was at war
in Vietnam and audiences in the late 60s were
growing accustomed to seeing images of horrific
real-life violence. Horror directors could only
hope to scare these audiences if they produced
horrors as violent and as extreme as the films and
photographs that were shown on the evening
news.
As horror moved into the 1970s the human
monster became more sadistic. The Last House
on the Left (Craven, 1972) and The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) became
infamous for their sustained graphic violence.
These films, like Psycho before them, located
their horror in a mundane present; The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre showed the effect of social
and economic isolation and on a rural family
whilst The Last House on the Left bought the
horror into small-town America. Both films
identified a society that, despite idealised
appearances, had a brutal underbelly.
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1972) created a
great deal of public and media attention and
outrage for its depiction of a possessed girl.
Like Rosemarys Baby (Polanski, 1968), The
Omen (Donner, 1976) and The Wicker Man
(Hardy, 1973) in the UK, The Exorcist depicted
the secularisation of society that had occurred
since World War 2 and dealt with the unease and
uncertainty this was causing by using devils,
demons and pagans as its monsters. The Exorcist
was also a film that identified post-war changes
in the structure of the family. The possessed
child is from a single-parent family headed by
a working mother. To try to help her daughter,
the mother looks to the grand narratives of
the day, science, medicine and psychotherapy
before reverting back to religion. The modern,
secular world fails to help and the demon is
eventually expelled by two Catholic priests (or
fathers) the implication being that the modern
world, with its fatherless families, reliance on
science rather than religion, allowed the demon
in.
The 1970s ended with more homespun
monsters when in 1978 the archetypal slasher
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film Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) was released.
Owing a lot to Psycho, the monster in this film
is a boy traumatised by rising sexual liberation
and his violent attacks against teenagers
are often seen as punishments for immoral
behaviour.
The End of an Era
The 1980s saw a glut of slasher films as horror
became a staple of the home video market. As
the audience grew used to the genres visceral
assaults, more outlandish and extreme spectacles
were needed to maintain interest. Film franchises
replicated the same ideas over and over, and
the genre grew tired and clichd, becoming
less economically viable. In the mid-90s horror
engaged with this familiarity for both comic and
horrific effect. Scream (Craven, 1996) uses an
ironic approach to the genre that is self-aware
and self-referential. It uses the codes and
conventions of the genre as a plot device, and the
monster in the first Scream film is finally defeated
by being hit with a television after a discussion of
the effects of horror films on audiences.
Contemporary Monsters
Recently horror has looked to its past and
there have been remakes of many of the films
mentioned in the earlier sections. Whether
bringing them up to date has added anything
more than CGI effects is a matter of personal
opinion; but what is often lost in a remake is a
sense of cultural context. Many remakes appear
to be style over substance as, whilst they may
be more polished, slicker and gorier, they are
more interested in the visceral experience
rather than an exploration of cultural fears.
Hollywood also looked to the Far-East in the 2000s
and re-made a number of Asian horrors films.
Eastern cultural meanings were adapted for the
Western audience. J-Horror uses the supernatural
monster, often ghosts, linked to the traditional
veneration of ancestors. Whilst these ideas are
not common in the West, these films do touch on
globalised concerns such as over-crowding (Dark
Water: Salles, 2005) and the impact of technology
(The Ring: Verbinski, 2002) and One Missed Call
(Vallette, 2008).
Aside from remakes, perhaps the most notable
development in contemporary horror is torture-
porn which focuses on extreme visceral violence,
nudity and sadistic torture. Saw (Wan, 2004)
is a long-running series of torture porn films,
utilising CGI to maximise the extreme nature of
the violence depicted. Its been suggested that
perhaps audience desensitisation is at the heart
of torture porns success. Mainstream television
shows such as CSI (CBS) uses graphic imagery;
and computer games have long used splatter,
exposing players to more and more extreme
violence. Torture porn does what horror has always
had to do: attempt to find more and more extreme
ways to scare (or repulse) the audience. However,
the rise of torture as a subject in horror also
parallels contemporary concerns over the post-
9/11 treatment of terror suspects and prisoners
of war as stories of Western government endorsed
torture was reported. Despite its violence, Saw
began by presenting the audience with a deeply
moral monster. The monster acts as judge offering
second chances (or punishments) to those he sees
as having transgressed. His torturous games can
be seen to be potentially good for his victims and
society even if his methods are extreme. Later
examples of the sub-genre however show torture
as a game and a pleasure with the monsters in
Hostel (Roth, 2005) being wealthy clients who pay
for the ultimate consumer thrill in a manner that
echoes recent concerns about human trafficking.
Contemporary culture is media-saturated.
Entertainment is available anywhere and anytime.
From on-demand TV, the apparently infinite
nature of the internet and mobile technology,
contemporary culture is arguably running the
risk of over-stimulation and the impact of
our reliance on technology for entertainment
and social interaction is often questioned. It is
frequently argued that over-stimulation could lead
to extreme desensitisation, and this idea can be
seen in recent horror monsters. Dehumanised feral
youth are the monsters of Eden Lake (Watkins,
2008); and the monsters in Funny Games
(Haneke, 2008) and The Strangers (Bertino ,
2008) are disconcertingly emotionally removed.
These monsters are also anonymous; Eden Lake
makes the group the monster and masks are
worn by the strangers. The nondescript clothing
and appearance of the killers in Funny Games
emphasises the impersonal nature of this violence
and there is a of lack clear motive for the violence
in these films other than the monsters desire to
seek stimulation. These monsters appear to be
the culmination of a desensitised culture which
has chosen to seek entertainment through the
terrorisation of others. They are calculating and
deliberate, implying that they are making violent
choices simply as a stimulus in their otherwise
over-stimulated and desensitised lives. The
Saw franchise shows how the monsters victims
become monsters themselves and the monsters in
these recent films could easily be those selected
by Jigsaw for punishment. Unlike those of previous
eras, these monsters are not invaders or creations
of science or poor parenting; they are selfish,
nihilistic creations of the culture itself.
Whether re-working traditional conventions
(the mad scientist in The Human Centipede
(Six, 2009); re-inventing itself for an adult TV
audience in The Walking Dead (AMC) and True
Blood (HBO); framing itself as parody or domestic
comedy in Dead Set (C4) and Being Human
(BBC3) or as soap opera and high-romance in
The Vampire Diaries (CW) and The Twilight
Saga, horror still attracts audiences. The genre
has the ability to adapt to allow it to tap into each
generations preoccupations and concerns and its
metaphorical approach can be used to deal with
ideas and issues that appeal to a range of audience
groups. Other genres such as Westerns may not be
able to speak to modern audiences in the way they
used to but horror continues to provide a cultural
catharsis over 100 years since it first hit celluloid.
Steph Hendry teaches Media at Runshaw College and is an
examiner for AQA.

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Bloody, brutal or just banal? For many,
the slasher film epitomises low
culture. Gabrielle OBrien thinks
the genre is worth a closer look...
Were here. Wherever here is.
Its one of those places people have
forgotten about.
Three ecstatic young backpackers are having
the time of their lives travelling around Australia.
Their sun-and-booze-drenched trip bears all the
hallmarks of the clichd gap year experience. But
the party ends when they leave the coast and
head for the dusty, desolate, unchartered terrain
of the Outback. Here the landscape dwarfs them;
they are struck silent by the vast emptiness of
this alien place. Their car breaks down. And then
along comes a native who knows this place like
the back of his hand
The narrative exposition for 2005s critically
and commercially successful Wolf Creek is not a
particularly original one. Director Greg McLean
revisits genre conventions that have been around
since Alfred Hitchcocks seminal Psycho. In doing
so, he creates a vivid nightmare thats capable
of shocking the pants off even the most cynical
horror aficionado, and breathes new life into this
feral breed of cinema.
Crouching in the shadows of serious cinema,
the slasher, stalker or splatter film has always
had its fair share of detractors. Generations of
critics have asserted that the genre is artless,
morally depraved and flagrantly misogynistic.
Yet even in the midst of such incendiary name
calling (and perhaps even because of it), slasher
films have continued to turn a profit. This horror
sub-genre has always had the power to polarise.
When Tobe Hoopers The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre was released in 1974, audience
responses veered from shrieking indignation
(a vile piece of sick crap with a complete lack
of imagination Stephen Koch, 1976), to awed
reverence. The Museum of Modern Art in New
York clearly rated the film; it is housed in the
museums permanent collection as an example of
uniquely powerful film-making.
Wolf Creek takes up this schizophrenic
heritage with frenetic vigour, making overt
nods to its most infamous forebear. Once
the somewhat tedious First Act is played out,
and night darkens the outback sky, Hoopers
landmark film is repeatedly referenced. The
atmosphere of dread so skilfully evoked in
Chainsaw is similarly foregrounded in Wolf
Creek. Canted framing is used to reinforce the
ominous sense of a disrupted state of play; the
mise-en-scne features iconography associated
with the barren, isolated landscape of the films
setting. We see the outlines of dead animals,
obscured by the blurring effects of a desert heat
haze. A battered road sign points out that its a
days drive to the next township.
These visual signifiers emphasise a chain of
cultural associations (foreign/rural/backwards/
threatening) that position it within a familiar
ideological framework for the slasher movie.
A series of binary oppositions is deployed to
structure and control audience expectations,
while aligning the spectator with the young
backpackers. The connotations of the setting
as an otherworldly, hostile space are essential in
shaping meaning for this binary system. This is
how setting comes to assume the significance of
a principal character in Wolf Creek.
The location is pictorialised, shot as something
to be admired and taken in, like a painting or a
wall mural. It is always shot from the perspective
of the outsider. The audience is cast as voyeur,
looking in on what he or she is unacquainted
WOLF CREEK
(dis)Location and the culture of the slasher genre
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with outside of the world of the film. In this way,
the cameras eye enacts a distancing and an
othering that the spectator is encouraged to
accept.
The outback then easily becomes the
backwards terrain of the cultural other, and
an intimidating stranger to the young tourists.
Here the urban (safe) rules so familiar to both
the young characters and the audience, no longer
apply. We are now on rural (dangerous) ground.
Extreme long shots help to symbolise this
binary premise, showing the three backpackers
struggling against an immense and hostile
background. Later, the amount of space only
elevates the sense of horror for the audience.
We realise that despite being surrounded by
seemingly limitless space, there is nowhere to run
for sanctuary. This is the uncivilised domain of
the monster/killer figure. The convergence of
menacing character and hostile setting charges
the film with an almost unbearable tension. The
Australian outback perhaps taps a direct line to
audience paranoia about the cultural other.
This kind of socio-geographical positioning
is not new to the slasher genre. The American
backwoods has often been exploited as
shorthand for a hotbed of regressive
psychology. In classic slashers like The Hills Have
Eyes, American Gothic, and of course The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, the violence and terror
seems to originate from within the setting itself.
The world of these films is a breeding ground
for uncivilised behaviours, and this is always
juxtaposed with the arrival of the more worldly
out-of-towners. Setting acts as a mirror for the
class divide, using an us versus them polarity
of representation. It also becomes a metaphor
for boundaries being dismantled and infringed
upon, out on the fringes of society, of culture, of
good taste. This is the disquieting filmic space
occupied by the slasher film.
Horror films generally play on audience
anxieties, and provide a kind of catharsis, often
with the eventual reinstatement of the status
quo. Slasher films go one further, routinely
having the threat re-established with the return
of the killer/monster figure in the films final
frames. Indeed, part of the pleasure for fans of
the genre, lies in waiting for the inevitable (and
usually implausible) resurrection of the killer
figure, who is given superhuman (and often
supernatural) powers of resilience.
Wolf Creek disrupts this narrative convention,
instead running with Hitchcocks notion of horror
being located in the real world. Serial killer
Mick Taylor is just a mortal, and this renders his
psychopathic actions all the more frightening
for the spectator. He is human and relentless,
and capable of the most perverse acts of cruelty.
Such characterisation complements the realistic
aesthetic of the film, along with shaky hand-held
camera work, a preference for diegetic sound,
and an emphasis on the natural environment in
the mise-en-scne. Mick is a character who fits
neatly into the critical landscape of the slasher
film. He is a crudely drawn monster with a
psychology that is never really delineated.
This is a recurring feature of the slasher killer,
from Michael Myers to Leatherface to Norman
Bates. In Wolf Creek, it makes Micks sickening
enjoyment of torture for sport all the more
appalling. It also facilitates another feature of
the slasher picture: that it may well make the
spectator feel physically sick.
The darkly humorous intertextuality of his
name sets the tone for Micks representation. He
draws on all the Crocodile Dundee stereotypes of
the rough and ready, uncultured Aussie bloke. A
few thinly disguised cultural clichs inform John
Jarrats performance, channelled into a catalogue
of unnerving physical tics. He has an unhinged
laugh that flies in the face of proper social cues,
and a nasty guttural throat clearing habit. Mick
is also a prolific gun owner who makes a regular
show of readjusting his swagmans hat. Sitting
around the campfire with the three backpackers,
Mick represents a collision between low and high
culture, age and youth, masculine and feminine,
danger and safety.
Mick also represents the dispossessed loner
who has been left without a regular job because
of technological advances. He tells the young
people that he used to kill vermin as a head
shooter, but now the use of poisons dropped
from helicopters has made his skills redundant.
This motif of social displacement due to
industrialisation appears in several films from
the slasher canon. Norman Bates motel gets little
business because of the new highway bypass;
the family of cannibals in The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre formerly had gainful employment as
butchers. Like Mick, they were replaced with
factories and machines. This subtext infers that
cultured society is somehow responsible for
these spurned, inhuman beasts that they are
the product of the family that abandoned them
to pursue its own self-interests.
Perhaps then, characters like Wolf Creeks
Mick perform a further psychic function for the
spectator. If he is a symbol of the dispossessed,
then his acts of screen violence permit the
middle-class spectator to shrug off any guilt at
their own comfortable existence. The audiences
emotional investment in the relentless horror of
Wolf Creek comes with a trade-off: the chance
to project their fears, anxieties and prejudices
onto the loathsome face of the very figure of
backwards, lowbrow culture, the figure of the
slasher monster.
Gabrielle OBrien teaches English and Media Studies and is
studying for an MA in Film Studies at Kingston University.
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