Zombies, vampires, ghouls: the stuff of cultural catharsis

Horror films offer an inventive filter for our real anxieties – which may explain the genre's current renaissance
    • The Guardian,
    • Jump to comments ()

If it is indeed the case that cultures get the monsters they deserve, then it would be not unreasonable to anticipate a timely British horror revolving around socially cleansed housing benefit applicants wreaking terrible revenge upon a diminishing cohort of bankers, holed up in a post-apocalyptic version of the City of London's Gherkin. So it is perhaps evidence of horror's capacity to be socially reflexive rather than socially realist that next week's debut release from the freshly animated Hammer Productions concerns instead a prepubescent vampire.

Let Me In, an English-language version of the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In, is the first endeavour from the infamous studio in 34 years, and marks a significant moment in the current British horror renaissance which has come, not unexpectedly, at a time when audiences are arguably more in need of inventive, alternative filters for facing their fears than for decades.

Fright flicks have traditionally flourished during periods of upheaval and uncertainty. The gothic fantasies of Dracula and Frankenstein offered cinema-goers in 1930s America an escape from the grinding realities of the Great Depression. Post-world war two, monster blockbusters provided audiences with a means of assuaging the collective guilt of nuclear attack, by recasting the human race as a force for good against an otherworldly destructive imperative. Body-snatch scenarios spoke to anxieties around McCarthyism and the red peril. Often made for low budgets outwith the mainstream studio system, horror movie makers also enjoyed more freedom, dodging censorship as well as the exigencies of commercial viability, to explore taboos, especially around depictions of sex and violence.

Horror has also always been a thoroughly knowing genre, its analogies deliberately malformed and oblique, its impulse to self-irony strong. The mindless, shambling flesh-eaters of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead preying on those doughty survivors barricaded inside a shopping mall pinioned the perils of mass consumerism as effectively as any Michael Moore diatribe. And latterly, the fleeter-of-foot living dead of Danny Boyle's 28 Days series satirised the tabloid terror of binge-drinkers. Nor was it surprising that the Daily Mail reviewed Eden Lake, James Watkins's visceral tale of a middle class couple menaced by a gang of feral teenagers on a camping trip, as though it were a documentary.

Watkins, currently filming the Susan Hill ghost story The Woman in Black for Hammer, notes that while the horror genre continues to offer a route through contemporary anxieties, how direct or conscious those expressions are is not always clear. Horror is not, after all, social commentary. He also makes a plea for subtlety: while it has become ever easier to film wounds, what you don't show is inevitably more interesting.

Hammer's present projects certainly appear to be a departure from the guts and gore of recently popular franchises like Saw. The Woman in Black is a period piece, while the forthcoming Wake Wood draws on The Wicker Man and Don't Look Now. While Eli Roth somewhat disingenuously claimed that his Hostel series, in which uniformly nubile twentysomethings are tortured to death by paying clients, was a response to the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, the results were unsubtle at best.

Indeed, it seems that audiences are nowadays again entranced by the possibilities of otherworldly shocks rather than real-world splatter. The noble tradition of vampirism may have been hijacked by soft-focus romance, according to Stephen King, but it is omnipresent. Over the summer Ghost Stories, a theatrical fright-fest created by the League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman drew huge audiences .

This may be inevitable as gore becomes more mainstream than ever. One can witness the loving dissection of a corpse on any given CSI episode, and cosy Sunday evening entertainment like Sherlock now stretches to exsanguinating serial killers. Nor is the 24-hour news cycle overly concerned with the viewer's finer feelings, while terrorist beheadings and state executions become instant YouTube classics.

It is curious, however, that horror – in whatever medium – continues to be regarded as a lowly form. Yet the idea that this genre excludes seriousness is ludicrous, as Ghost Stories' Dyson contended in a recent interview: "With works of supernatural fiction, you can go to places and articulate things that you can't do with any other form." It's doubtful that Hammer's hiring of the conspicuously literary Jeanette Winterson to pen a plot will alter that.

The genre may always be treated with contempt as the guardian of our dirtiest secrets and ugliest angsts. But as economic fragility, coalition cuts and terrorist threat promise to atomise the country into ever more menaced and menacing pockets of humanity, it is the mauled metaphors of horror that offer the cultural catharsis that has been psychologically necessary throughout the ages. A potential double-dip recession carries with it few fringe benefits, so seize them where you can.

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures