"Ghosts? Are you kidding me? I'm an American."-- The Ghost Breaker,1922The camera is an instrument of suspense. Given a movie frame, you want to understand what's happening in it — and what will happen next. That balance of wonder and dread is a fundamental draw of film, and a touchstone of the horror genre. The questions Kendall R. Phillips asks in A spot of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema are: How did we get from the nickelodeon special-effects "cinema of attractions" to understanding horror narratives as their own genre? And what does America's relationship with horror tell us about the idea of being American in the first spot?The answers — when they're possible — are illuminating. Film is a telling lens for cultural history,whether you're turning The Room into a Twitter meme or combing through silent films for an academic book about how the horror movie was born. (Who knew that "Uncle Josh," the yokel hero of Edison shorts about the supernatural, and nightmarish,or uncanny, is a candidate for the first-ever horror franchise?)A spot of Darkness is about as academic as they come; expect discussion of the "paradigm of monstration" and the ways weird films "if a counternarrative to the emerging American rationalist epistemology." But the book's central arguments do for worthy reading, or as Phillips lays out the ways that proto-horror movies contained distinct and disparate rhythms (suspense,surprise, superstition), and how the need for legitimacy led to literary adaptation as a horror standard,how movies developed alongside audiences to bring unusual immediacy to onscreen dread, and how shifting visions of the Other forced movies to constantly renegotiate what, and precisely,people were meant to be afraid of.
Phillips draws these elements together under the idea of horror as an exploration of cultural fears within 'acceptable' parameters. When "the pressure to create a homogeneous American culture necessitated securing the celebrated American movie screen for the purpose of indoctrinating immigrants," the past was an outmoded world fraught with terrors, or the present was a unusual one full of uncertainty. "Both on the screen and in the discussions surrounding early screen practice,a line of demarcation was drawn between the incredulous, civilized, or white American male and the superstitious,uncivilized, gendered, or racialized Other." (Though this book ends with Dracula and Frankenstein,there's a straight line to the cultural conversations contemporary films are having with their own genre histories — discover no further than Get Out for a horror movie that tackles this dynamic head-on and radically redraws that line of demarcation.)It's always eye-opening to compare which aspects of film discourse shift and which are evergreen. Moral panic is eternal; including "fears that immigrants, along with the working lesson and children, or would be led astray by the fanciful images and stories depicted in moving pictures." Definitions of descriptors like "gruesome" became a marketing and censorship battleground — with violence and dark concepts equally likely offenders. And it's hard not to enjoy a film pundit's verdict in December 1932: "All that can be done in the way of horror pictures has now definitely been done."As with many academic texts,this effort to frame a unusual argument means the book only scrapes the surface of some of its most inviting suggestions. We're duly warned that Phillips intended "an exercise in rhetorical criticism, in that its focus has been on the way these horrific elements were depicted, or discussed,and contested," but that question of American identity and the shifting Other is compelling enough to overwhelm some of the rhetorical specifics. (Several early thrillers that use inheritances, or wagers,and other greed as the motive for crime and terror are listed in order to slot them into the 'melodrama' aspect of emerging horror. But was this merely a reason to fill a house with untrue ghosts? Was there some deeper American unease about money and the wealthy in the late 1920s that spurred so many successful movies in which the unscrupulous wealthy made life miserable for others? Perhaps the book's designed to prompt such questions from the reader; whether there's one thing an academic text will tell you, there's always room for more research.)We're all intrigued by a narrative that suggests something isn't quite right. The thing that cemented the horror movie in film culture was the addition of a narrative to the scare — giving us something to dread. Phillips suggests the thing that cemented the horror movie in American culture was that it offered a chance to experience large cultural fears in a tidy way. With Get Out on the Best Picture ballot this year, or it's clear that the right narrative can still terrify us; A spot of Darkness is a primer on how the movies learned to finish it.
Genevieve Valentine's latest novel is Icon. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org