DARK

PHILLIPS
FILM

“Despite the powerful influence a number of their remarkable films continue

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film
to exercise, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and George Romero do not often
receive the sort of auteurist analysis provided by Dark Directions. This book
will be especially eye-opening for those relatively unfamiliar with the careers

DIRECTIONS
of these underappreciated directors, as Kendall Phillips describes their work
in ways that encourage the reader to seek out the films for a closer look.”
—Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, author of
Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National
Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film

“In Dark Directions, Kendall Phillips offers scrupulous readings of the film
rhetorics of auteurs George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, show-
ing how they engage the anxieties of contemporary culture in thematic
explorations of the body (Romero), the gothic (Craven), and the frontier
(Carpenter).”
—Thomas W. Benson, Penn State University

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halloween. Night of the Living Dead. These films
have been indelibly stamped on moviegoers’ psyches and are now considered
seminal works of horror. Guiding readers along the twisted paths between audi-
ence, auteur, and cultural history, author Kendall R. Phillips reveals the macabre
visions of these films’ directors in Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter,
and the Modern Horror Film.
The first volume ever to address these three artists together, Dark Direc-
tions is a spine-tingling and thought-provoking study of the horror genre and
the continued impact of these directors on American cinema. In analyzing the
individual works of Romero, Craven, and Carpenter, Phillips illuminates some
ROMERO, CRAVEN,
of the darkest minds in horror cinema.

Kendall R. Phillips is associate dean for research and graduate studies in the
CARPENTER, and the
College of Visual and Performing Arts and a professor in the Department of Com-
munication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. His book publications
include Controversial Cinema: The Films That Outraged America, Projected Fears:
Horror Films and American Culture, and Framing Public Memory.
MODERN HORROR FILM
Printed in the United States of America

Southern Illinois University Press

ISBN 0-8093-3095-4
1915 University Press Drive
Mail Code 6806
Carbondale, IL 62901
ISBN 978-0-8093-3095-9
Kendall R. Phillips
University Press
Southern Illinois

www.siupress.com

Cover illustration: Zombies lumber toward the camera in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Courtesy of British Film Institute.

Phillips cvr mech.indd 1 1/3/12 11:27 AM

DARK DIRECTIONS
 DARK DIRECTIONS
ROMERO, CRAVEN, CARPENTER, AND
THE MODERN HORROR FILM

Kendall R. Phillips

Southern Illinois University Press

Carbondale and Edwardsville
Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Kendall R.
Dark directions : Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the
modern horror film / Kendall R. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-3095-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-3095-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-3097-3 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-3097-0 (ebook)
1. Horror films—United States—History and criti-
cism. 2. Romero, George A.—Criticism and interpre-
tation. 3. Craven, Wes—Criticism and interpretation.
4. Carpenter, John, 1948– —Criticism and interpreta-
tion. I. Title.
PN1995.9.H6P55 2012
791.43'6164—dc23 2011024180

Printed on recycled paper.

The paper used in this publication meets the mini-
mum requirements of American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For Catherine, the light of my life
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Auteur, Genre, and the Rhetorics of Horror 1

Part One. Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero 17

1. The Body as Contrast: Romero’s Living Dead 22
2. The Body as Site of Struggle: The Crazies, Monkey
Shines, The Dark Half, Bruiser   43
3. Romero’s Mythic Bodies: Martin and Knightriders 59

Part Two. Gothic Dimensions in the Films of Wes Craven 73

4. Craven’s Gothic Form: Nightmares, Screams, and Monsters 77
5. Gothic Technologies: The Serpent and the Rainbow, Deadly
Friend, Swamp Thing, Red Eye, Shocker   97
6. Gothic Families: The People under the Stairs, The Hills
Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left   109

Part Three. Desolate Frontiers in the Films of John Carpenter 123

7. Sites under Siege: Dark Star, Assault on Precinct
13, The Thing, Village of the Damned 127
8. Forbidden Thresholds: The Fog, Ghosts of Mars, Halloween,
Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness   137

vii
 Contents

9. Drifters in Desolation: Big Trouble in Little China, Vampires,

They Live, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A. 149
Conclusion 169

Filmography 177
Notes 191
Selected Bibliography 203
Index 207

viii
 Illustrations

Ben in Night of the Living Dead 30

Soldier and scientist in Day of the Dead 33
Zombies at the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead 37
Allan and monkey helper Ella in Monkey Shines 49
George Stark in The Dark Half 53
King Billy in Knightriders 65
Freddy and Heather’s son in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare 82
Sam and her father in Deadly Friend 101
Heather in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare 105
Members of the Hill clan and the Carter family in The Hills Have Eyes 113
Lieutenant Bishop in Assault on Precinct 13 130
Elizabeth in The Fog 139
Michael Myers in Halloween 143
An alien in They Live 154
Snake Plissken in Escape from New York 162

ix
 Acknowledgments

This book comes from years of conversations with students about horror
films, and I want to acknowledge the gracious support and intellectual
generosity of those students and also the support of my colleagues at
Syracuse University. The research of this book was made possible through
assistance from the College of Visual and Performing Arts and with funds
made available through the Judith Greenberg Seinfeld Distinguished Fac-
ulty Fellowship.
I also want to acknowledge the help of the British Film Institute in
identifying stills used throughout this book and the support of Karl Kageff
and the staff of Southern Illinois University Press. The manuscript was
greatly improved through the comments of three anonymous reviewers
as well as the comments provided by Susan Owen, Sarah Projansky, and
Catherine Thomas.

xi
DARK DIRECTIONS
 Introduction: Auteur, Genre, and the Rhetorics of Horror

The year 1968 was a remarkably dark one for Americans. The war in Viet-
nam reached its tragic zenith with the Tet offensive, and the situation on
the ground was so bad that even venerable news anchor Walter Cronkite
declared that the United States could not achieve victory. February of that
year saw the highest death toll to date for American service personnel in
the war, and at home, popular opinion was turning dramatically against
the Johnson administration. Student-led protests became increasingly
violent during 1968 with a spectacular and bloody climax at the Demo-
cratic National Convention in Chicago, at which scores of protesters were
assaulted and arrested by Chicago police, and by many accounts, a violent
spirit seemed to creep across the entire nation. The dreams of a peaceful
flower-powered revolution seemed to crumble before the onslaught of
violent images from home and abroad, and the public discourse took on
an increasingly pessimistic hue.
Perhaps the darkest moments of 1968 came with the tragic murders of
the generation’s most public and potent dreamers. On June 4, Robert Ken-
nedy, brother of slain president John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in a Los
Angeles hotel as he was celebrating a primary victory in California that
saw him poised to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency.
Those fateful shots ended the hope America’s return to the hallowed days
of the early 1960s and Camelot. Exactly two months earlier, on April 4, the
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain by another assassin’s bullet
on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s death
sparked a series of devastating riots in major cities across the country,
and dreams of peaceful, nonviolent progress grew dim.

1
 Introduction

As an odd and minor coincidence, it was on the night of April 4, 1968,

that George Romero and Russell Streiner were driving from Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, to New York City to seek distributors for their low-budget
horror film Night of the Living Dead.1 While there is no way to equate
the horror of King’s assassination and the subsequent nights of riots and
violence that followed with the on-screen terrors constructed by Romero
and his associates, at a cultural level these two events—one real and one
filmic—registered the same movement in the national psyche. By 1968,
America had become a harsher, more pessimistic, and more violent place,
and the popular culture reflected this movement. This dark passage and
its cinematic reflection is the focus of the present work.
America, of course, has always been a violent place, and violence has
a unique and complicated position within American culture’s self-con-
cept, something American films have long chronicled. Among the most
popular early silent films were those featuring criminals, outlaws, and
gunplay, and these elements have remained relatively constant features
of American cinema, from Westerns and war films to gangster movies
and, of course, horror films. Horrific images—of demons and monsters
and madmen—have also been part of American cinema since its incep-
tion in the late nineteenth century, and in some ways, horror films make
up a particularly interesting barometer of America’s darker and more
violent attitudes. In this regard, it is notable that the first “golden age”
of the American horror film began in 1931, one of the darkest years of
the Great Depression. It was in 1931 that Universal Studios released the
twin specters of evil that stand as the foundation of the American horror
film—Dracula and Frankenstein.
In an earlier book, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture,
I sought to track the development of the American horror film by explor-
ing the most influential films and the way they engaged their particular
moment in cultural history.2 One of my conclusions in that work—in
some ways a validation of an already commonly held belief—was that
horror films tend to tap into broader cultural anxieties and serve as a
kind of allegorical projection of our very real fears onto the generally
safer space of the silver screen. Not surprisingly, then, as the anxiet-
ies circulating in the culture in the twentieth century changed, so too
did the films that reflected them. Thus, I suggested in Projected Fears a
connection between the various iterations of the horror genre and the
specific cultural, historical moment of their emergence and argued that
this connection be thought of in terms of a kind of cultural resonance.
By resonance, I mean the ways that a particular type of horror narrative

2
 Introduction

develops a sympathetic hum in relation to cultural anxieties circulating

at that particular time. The Universal Studios monsters, in this analysis,
resonated in some ways with anxieties present during the Great Depres-
sion, just as the science fiction­–flavored horror of the “creature features”
resonated with the anxieties of the early Cold War.
In the present work, I want to extend this analytic framework to con-
sider another element in the complex interplay between film, genre, and
cultural history: the filmmaker. Whatever resonance may develop between
broad cultural anxieties and a particular filmic monster will be inflected
through the specific rhetorical style of a given filmmaker. Dark Directions
is an effort to explore the connections between filmic horror and cultural
anxieties and does so by attending to a group of directors whose influ-
ence on our contemporary notion of horror seems undeniable: George
Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter. All three directors began their
careers during the second golden age of American horror—a period that
can be said to have begun with Romero’s 1968 film and to have ended
roughly around 1982—and in many ways, these three could be considered
the primary architects of the framework of horror emerging during this
period. There were, obviously, numerous horror films in the years before
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and, indeed, several directors whose
work was independent and provocative, if relatively low-budget, includ-
ing William Castle, Roger Corman, and Hershell Gordon Lewis. As I try
to demonstrate in the next chapter, however, Night of the Living Dead
inaugurated a new era in horror, one marked by increasing brutality, cyni-
cism, and critical acumen. My choice of 1982 as a closing date for this era
is based largely on the generally negative reactions to John Carpenter’s
masterpiece, The Thing. This film epitomized much of the bleak spirit of
the second golden age, but where Carpenter’s earlier films had been widely
acclaimed and drawn large audiences, by the time The Thing premiered,
the mood of the country had shifted. There were, of course, a number of
horror films released in the latter part of the 1980s, ranging from low-
budget pictures like William Lustig’s 1988 Maniac Cop to controversial
films like John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Still,
in spite of variously provocative or successful horror films released in the
decades following 1982, the fourteen years of the genre’s second golden age
saw a remarkably diverse body of work within the horror genre, including
such iconic films as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), William
Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Mas-
sacre (1974), Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1976), Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976),
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

3
 Introduction

The second golden age also saw the emergence of numerous indepen-
dent and creative directors who devoted tremendous energy to the horror
genre and whose work fundamentally shaped it, including filmmakers
like Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg, and Sean Cunningham. While
dozens of films added to the unique contours of this era of horror and a
dozen or more directors helped to shape the nature of the genre, I have
decided to attend to the three filmmakers who, in my estimation at least,
most dramatically influenced the second golden age and most directly
laid the foundation for the subsequent iterations of the genre. While I
spend considerable time exploring the works of these filmmakers in the
subsequent chapters of this book—and in that way warrant their worthi-
ness for examination—it seems useful to sketch out here the place each
holds in the history of the genre.
As already suggested, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead inau-
gurated a new era of horror in American cinema, and he is perhaps best
known for this early groundbreaking film. Beyond this initial success,
however, Romero has crafted an impressive body of work that not only
has remained within the horror genre—with a few notable exceptions—
but has also remained consistently independent. His films have generally
retained both low budgets and a gritty attitude that cuts against the grain
of most mainstream horror films. Additionally, and perhaps most impor-
tant, Romero has remained a polemical and insightful critic of American
culture. Certainly this is the case in his most well-known series of films
revolving around the living dead—a series that began in 1968 with Night
of the Living Dead and progressed with the 1978 release of the remark-
ably popular Dawn of the Dead, the low-budget 1985 Day of the Dead,
the 2005 Land of the Dead, and the re-imagined rise of the living dead
in his 2007 Diary of the Dead and its 2009 sequel, Survival of the Dead.
As numerous commentators have noted, at the heart of this series is a
harsh and unswerving critique of various tendencies in American culture,
from racism to consumerism. In addition to the much-discussed Living
Dead series, Romero’s other pictures also pursue his unique approach to
horror as political critique. In films ranging from the vampire tale Martin
(1977) to the murder revenge fantasy of Bruiser (2000), Romero has not
only crafted unique visions of horror but also pursued a series of basic
questions about the nature of American culture.
Unlike Romero, director Wes Craven’s style has been more dynamic,
evolving to match the aesthetic of the day, and in that way Craven has
achieved major box office success with a remarkable degree of regularity.
His directorial debut came in the controversial and nihilistic The Last

4
 Introduction

House on the Left (1972), a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring
(1960), and Craven followed this with another brutal film focused on a
family’s battle for survival in The Hills Have Eyes (1977). After a series
of less successful films, Craven introduced a twist in his style in a film
that in many ways has become his signature—the immensely popular A
Nightmare on Elm Street. This 1984 film, which introduced the soon-to-be
ubiquitous killer Freddy Krueger, revamped the slasher cycle of films (Hal-
loween [1978], Friday the 13th [1980], and the like) through a supernatu-
ral killer who stalks his victims in their dreams. While Freddy Krueger
returned again and again in a series of sequels, Craven had little to do with
most of them, although he did write the screenplay for Nightmare on Elm
Street Part 3 (1987) and finally returned to helm a revamping of the story
in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994). During this period, Craven also
directed a series of films with varying levels of success and interest, includ-
ing The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Shocker (1989), and The People
under the Stairs (1991). But in 1996, Craven returned to prominence with
another enormously successful slasher film titled Scream. This postmod-
ern remixing of the traditional stalk-and-slash cycle of horror films from
the 1980s helped to usher in a series of similarly slick films that combined
humor and horror with a parodic and self-referential twist, including
Urban Legend (1998) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997).
The third director I consider in this book is John Carpenter, whose 1978
Halloween became the template for the slasher subgenre that has, in many
ways, dominated the horror genre ever since. In the years immediately
following the massive success of Halloween, Carpenter seemed destined
to eclipse his predecessors and join the more hallowed and respected
directors of his generation—Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and
Martin Scorsese. Carpenter followed up Halloween with another low-
budget but highly effective horror tale, The Fog (1980), and then shifted
slightly out of the traditional horror genre with the dark science fiction
thriller Escape from New York, a film New York Times critic Vincent Canby
considered one of the best of 1981.
Carpenter’s run of popular and critical success came to an end, ironi-
cally, with the most cinematically accomplished film of his career: the
1982 remake of The Thing. Carpenter’s bleak and extremely violent film
brilliantly captured the negative and pessimistic tone that had been the
hallmark of the horror film since, at least, Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead and highlighted the gritty brutality that had preoccupied Romero
and Craven as well as contemporaries like Hooper and Cronenberg. In The
Thing, Carpenter synthesizes all this darkness—much as his Halloween

5
 Introduction

had successfully synthesized previous strands of sexuality and guilt from

films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974)—but the sci-fi remake
proved a popular and critical failure, at least at the time of its release.
Critics recoiled from the film’s excessive gore and violence as well as from
its unrelentingly dark and pessimistic tone. But there was more to it than
that. As Anne Billson notes, “The Thing went belly up at the box-office,
and not just because of the overwhelming blanket of negative criticism.
Just as likely to have been a factor was the prevailing mood of the times.”3
By 1982, America was fully within the cultural contours of the Reagan
revolution with its strength, hopefulness, and promises of a “new morning
in America.” It was Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, a decid-
edly more optimistic alien story, that dominated the American cultural
imagination in 1982. Carpenter’s film failed, at least in part, because it
felt out of place in this new climate, and it was in many ways the popular
and critical failure of The Thing that marked the end of the era of horror
films that began with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
However, the end of this era did not end the careers of these three direc-
tors, or of their contemporaries. Romero, Craven, and Carpenter have con-
tinued making films up to the time of the present writing. Romero’s films
have generally remained small and lower budget, often with unknown
actors and limited studio involvement. Craven, as noted above, has proved
adept at recapturing the popular imagination. Carpenter’s post-1982 works,
like those of Romero, have been less successful and have continued to
straddle the line between horror and science fiction, including films like
They Live (1988), Village of the Damned (1995), and Ghosts of Mars (2001).
My purpose in this book is to explore the unique vision of each of
these influential directors to offer not only a better sense of their films
but also a deeper understanding of the period of horror filmmaking in
which they emerged and that they helped to craft. Before turning to that
central work, however, it seems worthwhile to spend some time explain-
ing and justifying my approach in this study.
Some people picking up this book may wonder why someone would
want to write about directors like Romero, Craven and Carpenter. This
is a good question and one that deserves at least an initial answer here,
although, in another way, it seems odd to need to justify studying the
films of these three directors. Overall, their films have achieved notable
levels of popularity and acclaim and this in spite of their often limited
budgets and modest promotion. Indeed, given the tendency of the trio
to work outside, or at least on the margins, of the major studio systems,

6
 Introduction

they could be thought of as among the most original and independent

“maverick directors” of their era. And yet, when film scholars and buffs
talk about the great American directors—or auteurs—the names men-
tioned are more likely to be Robert Altman and Scorsese and Kubrick
rather than Romero and Craven and Carpenter.
The tendency to dismiss directors of horror films is illustrated nicely
in a casual observation made by Charles J. Maland in his recent review of
American cinema in 1978: “It was a sour year for many auteurs who had
emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s: among the disappointments
were Robert Altman’s A Wedding and Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz. On the
other hand, some genre films achieved aesthetic and/or fiscal success.
Horror films continued with films like Omen II, Dawn of the Dead, The
Fury, The Eyes of Laura Mars, and the most successful at the box office,
Halloween, which in turn helped spawn the slasher cycle.” 4 In this offhand
comment, Altman and Lumet, admittedly impressive filmmakers, hold
the position of auteurs, while Romero, director of Dawn of the Dead, the
sequel to his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead, and Carpenter,
who wrote the screenplay for The Eyes of Laura Mars and directed Hal-
loween, are obscured by the genre within which their films appeared.
Maland’s observation is not uncommon but is instructive with regard to
the assumptions wrapped up in many discussions of film directors, and
in turn, these assumptions can serve as a useful springboard into laying
out some of the basic principles guiding the present book.
First, and most obviously, there is a long-standing tendency to attribute
an authorship function to the director—although in reality the produc-
tion of a film is one of the most expansive and collaborative of artistic
endeavors with key components added by actors, editors, Foley artists,
composers, and screenwriters. But auteur theory is, ultimately, about
locating the function of “author” within the purview of one individual—
usually the director. While the notion of auteur has received considerable
critique—around the very idea that there is such a thing as an author as
well as the realities of production—the tendency to focus on directors
has remained strong within film studies.5
A second assumption wrapped up in Maland’s observation touches
on the tendency to differentiate those high-quality directors who have
achieved the position of auteur from those who simply make films. This
tendency has been a central part of research into auteurs since the earli-
est days of film studies. It was the French Cahiers school—a name for
the loose collection of critics and filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard
and François Truffaut, who contributed to the French journal Cahiers du

7
 Introduction

Cinéma in the 1950s—that began a systematic focus on the great directors

in whose work could be seen overriding artistic and psychological ten-
dencies. These directors, mostly Americans like John Ford and Howard
Hawks, were seen as rising above the confines of the studio system that
was perceived as having a homogenizing effect on films. Indeed, it was
against these homogeneous “factory” films that the unique genius of the
auteur stood out.
A third assumption we can tease out of the Maland quotation is a
sense that the auteur emerged, at least with particular force, during a
specific historical period. The historic rise of the auteur came, in part,
because of changes in the conditions of film production that occurred
during the 1950s and 1960s and, in part, because of the introduction of
auteur theory to American filmgoers and scholars. The emergence of
the American director can be traced back to D. W. Griffith in the 1920s
and to the recognition by film critics of the 1930s of the unique vision
of particular directors who were able to outshine the studio standards.
Writing in 1930, British filmmaker and critic Paul Rotha observed, “There
are, in Hollywood, fortunately, men whose very personality overrides the
machinery.”6 For the most part, though, the studio system in the 1930s
and 1940s downplayed the unique position of the director in favor of
marketing films under studio banners. Changes in the studio produc-
tion system, however, were coming. The 1940s saw the breakup of the
monolithic studio monopoly that had dominated American film since the
1920s. A 1948 Supreme Court decision forced the studios to sell off their
theaters and ended the practice of block-booking (a contractual system
that required theaters to lease large blocks of films instead of allowing
them to rent a single film). The period also saw a dramatic decline in
American movie attendance, and Hollywood studios found themselves
losing their cultural as well as economic monopoly.
The decline of the studio system opened a space in which certain
American directors were able to begin pursuing more independence. As
Virginia Wright Wexman notes, “The turn to independent production in
the 1950s gave all top-ranked film artists—and especially directors—more
power to pick and choose projects and to control them from beginning
to end. Moreover by the 1970s the popularity of international art cinema,
which featured highly individualistic directorial stylists like Ingmar Berg-
man, Akria Kurosawa [sic], and Michelangelo Antonioni, had given rise
to a competing crop of European-edged American talents like Robert
Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese.”7 (This list, by now,
should be familiar for both its inclusions and exclusions.)

8
 Introduction

The rise of the independently minded director was not, however, solely
a function of changes in Hollywood. The other major historical variable
influencing the changes in American film was the broader cultural ten-
sions and turmoil emerging during the late 1950s and 1960s, including
the Cold War, the women’s movement, civil rights, and the student move-
ment against the war in Vietnam. Additionally, American sensibilities
were dramatically shifting during this period, and the film industry was
also grappling with the rise of its primary competitor, television. Desper-
ate to regain some of its lost market share and to tap into the tumultu-
ous changes in America’s cultural landscape, American film producers
became increasingly open to experimentation and innovation—both
technically and artistically. As Barry Keith Grant has observed about
filmmaking in the 1960s, “The decade was one of profound change and
challenge for Hollywood, as it sought to adapt to both technological inno-
vation and evolving cultural taste. Ultimately, by the end of the 1960s
movies were made, distributed and exhibited differently than when the
decade began.”8 The period saw everything from the use of 3D and Cin-
emascope to the rise of art house theaters and urban grind houses, and
it was during this time that the seeds were planted that would give rise
to the second golden age of the horror film and the unique trajectories
of Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and many of their colleagues.9 It is worth
noting that this period also saw the dismantling of the official mecha-
nisms for self-censorship—the Production Code—and a greater amount
of freedom for directors and screenwriters to explore topics previously
forbidden. Indeed, by November 1968, the Production Code had been
replaced by the rating system still in use today, which also opened the
door for films to be released without a rating at all, a system that would
be fully exploited by the horror directors of the period.10
These historical conditions allowed a space for a group of unique
directorial talents who were able to experiment with, challenge, and
fundamentally change the ways we understand films and the practice
of watching them. Robert P. Kolker characterizes this as a momentary,
fragile, and productive period that produced a “small group of filmmak-
ers who emerged in the late sixties and seventies and were able to take
brief advantage of the transitional state of the studios, using their talents
in critical, self-conscious ways, examining the assumptions and forms
of commercial narrative cinema.”11 In Kolker’s analysis, this period was
produced by the tumultuous changes in American culture and shift-
ing nature of the American film industry. In spite of the creativity and
potency of this era of filmmaking, however, the period did not last long.

9
 Introduction

Not only would the America of the 1980s develop a more conservative
film taste, but beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s,
Hollywood became increasingly corporate, leading to the current indus-
try landscape, dominated as it is by media conglomerations.
In his excellent book A Cinema of Loneliness, Kolker traces the con-
tours of this transitional period by attending to a handful of auteurs whose
works helped to define it: Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese,
Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman. In Kolker’s reading, these direc-
tors worked to interrogate the nature of film itself and “created a body
of exciting work, formally adventurous, carefully thought out, and often
structurally challenging,” and in many ways, Kolker’s sense of this period
and his approach to these directors serves as both the inspiration and
template for my current project. In my estimation, Romero, Craven, and
Carpenter also produced exciting, adventurous, and provocative works
in the same time frame, and these works also challenged our cinematic
and ideological assumptions. And yet, as with Maland, in Kolker’s other-
wise fine critical reading of this dynamic period, those directors working
primarily within the horror genre are almost completely ignored.
In a way, Dark Directions is meant as a kind of counterpart to Kolker’s
earlier work. At one level, I hope to suggest that directors like Romero,
Craven, and Carpenter should be recognized as having pushed bound-
aries, challenged conventions, and shaped our contemporary cinematic
landscape as powerfully as their more lauded colleagues like Coppola and
Kubrick. Since its inception in France in the 1950s and certainly since its
arrival on American shores in the form of Andrew Sarris’s influential 1968
book The American Cinema, auteur studies has been about distinguishing
a certain class of filmmakers whose genius deserves special recognition.
While I am in some ways loath to play into this logic of pantheons and
canons, there can be little doubt that the influence of such thinking is
widespread. Whether in the academic classroom or the local movie the-
ater lobby, there is a clear sense of a list of “great” American directors,
and this list is, with necessary variations, remarkably consistent. My hope
in taking up this auteur logic is, in part, to challenge the conception that
the truly “adventurous” and “provocative” films were crafted within only
the “respectable” genres of film.
Horror, of course, has rarely been considered a respectable genre,
although over the past few decades it has seen increasing attention and
appreciation. Much of this critical attention, including my own previ-
ous work, has attended to the relationship between the horror genre and
broader issues in contemporary culture. So, for example, in her influential

10
 Introduction

book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
Carol J. Clover explores psychosexual dynamics related to gender and
gender confusion in the horror films of the 1970s and 1980s, and in Shock-
ing Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern
Horror Film, Adam Lowenstein examines the relationship between horrific
historical events and specific horror films or, as he puts it, the “allegorical
collision between filmic texts and traumatic historical contexts.”12
Underlying the allegorical, or resonant, relationship between filmic
horrors and the cultural environments into which they emerge is a theo-
retical framework that undergirds most explorations of the horror genre,
the notion of repression. Drawing from Freud’s influential discussion of
the uncanny, critics of the horror film have long pointed to the ways in
which horrific images function by being simultaneously familiar and
shocking. Freud contends, “Among those things that are felt to be fright-
ening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the fright-
ening element is something that has been repressed and now returns.”13
Adapting this notion into film studies, Robin Wood declares, “One might
say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition
of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its reemergence drama-
tized, as in our nightmares.”14 For most critics, the capacity of horror to
provide an allegorical glimpse into dimensions of our collective repres-
sion provides at least the hope for a moment of critical reflection. Philip
Tallon, for example, suggests, “Horror, therefore, provides a dark mirror
in which we can examine ourselves by honestly facing the shadow side
of the human condition as well as our deepest intuitive (and inviolate)
sense of right and wrong.”15
Given this focus on the cultural function of horror, it should not be
surprising that the vast majority of critical explorations of these films
have been done in terms of the genre and not with a focus on individual
directors.16 Thus, as with the broader assumptions intertwined in Mal-
and’s lamenting the fate of auteurs in 1978, it is the genre that stands as
the primary object of interest—the filmmakers, regardless of how famous
or noteworthy, hold a secondary position. What I hope to accomplish
in the present work is an exploration of the intersection of the broader
genre of horror and the particular articulations of that genre by three of
its most prominent and influential purveyors.
The past few years have seen some increase in attention to horror
directors and, indeed, to the directors considered here. Ian Conrich and
David Woods, for example, edited a volume of scholarly essays attend-
ing to various films by John Carpenter in 2004, and the first sustained

11
 Introduction

scholarly volume devoted to the films of George Romero, Tony Williams’s

The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knights of the Living Dead, appeared in
2003. More recently, Kim Paffenroth has suggested a provocative framing
of Romero’s films in terms of theological/moral conceptions in his 2006
Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth. In
spite of his box office success, Wes Craven has received the least scholarly
attention; John Kenneth Muir’s Wes Craven: The Art of Horror constitutes
the only book-length study of his body of work.17
Where Dark Directions differs from these earlier works is in its focus on
the intersection of genre and auteur. Romero, Craven, and Carpenter each
demonstrate a particular perspective—evident in recurring patterns of
narrative structure, character development, visual motifs, and the like—
on the intersection of the forces of cultural repression and those repressed
entities that make their return. In this way, each director evidences a
particular vision of horror by locating this intersection in unique ways.
For Romero, the intersection of repression and the reappearing
repressed is in the human body. Horror films have long had a predilection
for the body—especially exploring its corporeal limits and the seemingly
innate distaste for its destruction. Romero’s films, however, consistently
place the corporeal reality of the human body at the center of his political
critiques, allowing the physical body to be the backdrop against which
various cultural ills and tendencies are contrasted and reworked. While
less explicitly political in his ambitions than Romero, Craven’s evolving
directorial style does evince certain regular tendencies, and in some ways,
these tendencies become all the more interesting when contrasted with
his otherwise changing style of filmmaking. At the heart of my reading
of Craven’s diverse and broad body of work is his continued worrying
of the thin line between reality and the world of illusion in which our
various repressed desires reemerge as phantoms and dreams. This con-
ceit is most obvious in the dream killer Freddy Krueger, but as I seek to
demonstrate in the chapters devoted to Craven’s work, the line between
reality and illusion consistently motivates his films and provides a way of
understanding both the aesthetic and political dimensions of his work.
Where Romero can be thought of as locating horror within the corpo-
reality of the human body and Craven along the contested line between
reality and illusion, the films of John Carpenter locate the intersection of
repression and repressed through a preoccupation with space and, more
specifically, with a variation on the notion of dangerous frontiers in which
we are surrounded by enemies and always in danger of stumbling into
forbidden spaces. In films as varied as Halloween, Big Trouble in Little

12
 Introduction

China (1986), and Ghosts of Mars, the horror that propels the plotlines is
unleashed through the violation of some restricted space—whether the
old Myers house, the tunnels beneath San Francisco’s Chinatown, or the
mining shafts on Mars.
By examining the works of these three filmmakers in the same volume,
I hope to accentuate the way each addressed a similar set of cultural
issues—ranging from the political unrest of the 1970s to dynamics of race
and gender—but did so through distinct filmic frameworks. In order to
approach these filmic frameworks, I employ a critical analysis informed
by work in rhetorical studies. While rhetoric is a large and multifaceted
field, my approach involves careful attention to the films of each direc-
tor in an effort to discern in these films a set of patterns that can help
provide a more nuanced and sensitive reading of each individual film as
well as of the body of work as a whole. The assumption underlying this
approach is articulated by Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson
in their study of the films of Frederick Wiseman. Benson and Anderson
argue, “Films are social constructions and as such invite shared experi-
ences. The rhetorical critic inquires into that shared experience, not by
surveying audience response, and not simply by reporting the critic’s
subjective, impressionistic response, but by interrogating the film itself,
regarding the film as a constructed invitation to a complex experience
of thoughts and feelings.”18 This perspective is a useful way of thinking
about the persuasive potential in films. While audiences can interpret a
film in a wide range of ways, the film provides some persuasive cues as
to the kinds of experiences it invites the audience to undergo. Thus, in
subsequent chapters I treat each director’s body of work as a body of per-
suasive texts, each designed to invite the audiences to a unique experience
but also, if the conception of the auteur holds true, an experience that
bears substantive relation to tendencies in the director’s broader vision.
The rhetorical approach outlined above suggests a dynamic set of
relations among auteur, genre, filmic text, audience, and cultural his-
tory. David Blakesley notes that “this approach treats film as a rhetorical
situation involving the director, the film, and the viewer in the total act
of making meaning.”19 In my efforts to grapple with the complex set of
relations that influence our processes of meaning making, I have attended
primarily to the filmic text. The text, in my view, is the crucial point
of linkage by which audiences at a given point in cultural history are
invited to share a set of experiences crafted by a filmmaker and utilizing
broad sets of cultural frameworks including genre, ideology, and other
contexts. Each filmic text, in other words, should be understood within

13
 Introduction

the context of its emergence, and indeed, my sense is that the changing
cultural contexts influenced both the rise and the demise of these three
unique artistic talents. In many ways, Romero and Carpenter, and to
a lesser extent Craven, are makers of their moment—arising during a
period of unprecedented freedom and exploration and also of remarkable
turmoil, conflict, and anxiety. Within these conditions, each filmmaker
sought to explore a different path into the dark recesses of the American
consciousness. But, as American culture changed, its relation to par-
ticular motifs of fear and horror changed as well. This is not to say that
the later works of these filmmakers are irrelevant or facile but to suggest
that the cultural historical contexts had changed. Crucially, the vibrant
relationship between text and context—as between filmmaker and film
audience—is dynamic and changing, and the changes in these relation-
ships should help to reveal a great deal about the narratives being spun,
the filmmakers crafting them, and the audiences invited to share in them.
This textual focus is one already familiar in film studies, especially
those focused on auteurs. Andrew Sarris, one of the earliest and most
prominent proponents of auteur studies, described his approach as one
focused on the films themselves, arguing, “I believe that a director’s for-
mal utterances [his films] tell us more about his artistic personality than
do his informal utterances [his conversations].”20 In Sarris’s articulation
of this notion, the focus is on the mise-en-scène, which he defined as
“all the means available to a director to express his attitude towards his
subject.”21 Interestingly, Sarris’s notion of mise-en-scène bears a striking
similarity to Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric: “the faculty of observing in
a given situation the available means of persuasion.”22
As a final note about my approach, I assume that each film crafted
by these directors need not be treated equally. In this way, it is not my
purpose to provide an annotated filmography or to seek to treat each film
as if they were of equal importance to the broader body of work. I think
it not unfair to suggest that for each director, some films will stand out
as stronger than others. This should be understood not only in terms of
popular and/or critical success—though these are useful indicators of a
broader public resonance—but also in terms of the ways in which par-
ticular films seem to capture with greater or lesser success the director’s
underlying tendencies. In this way, some films may bear considerable
critical attention while others might occasion only a glance or mention.
Regardless of the unevenness of their respective bodies of work, how-
ever, it is undeniable that these three directors fundamentally shaped
the nature of the American horror films during the second golden age.

14
 Introduction

It seems equally undeniable that the current age of American horror—

dominated as it is by sadistic torture films and remakes of films from
the 1970s—continues to be largely shaped by their vision. In this way,
the unique directorial visions of George Romero, Wes Craven, and John
Carpenter remain crucial to the ongoing development of the American
horror film and the dark directions they continue to take.

15
 Part One

Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

It is fitting that George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead begins in a

cemetery. On a surface level, the location of the opening sequence in
Night makes atmospheric and narrative sense. In terms of atmosphere,
the aging and isolated cemetery draws upon the gothic aesthetic com-
monplace in horror films since their inception, and in terms of narra-
tive, it makes sense that one of the first places people would encounter
recently reanimated corpses would be in the place where they were laid
to rest. But at a deeper level, the cemetery is the perfect location for the
beginning of Romero’s career. Not only are cemeteries the places in which
we deposit the corpses of the departed, but they are also the epicenter
of the complex set of relations we have with our own bodies. Romero’s
filmmaking is preoccupied with the body. Of course, horror filmmakers
have long focused on the body, but where Romero’s emphasis differs is
on his attention to the points of intersection of cultural norms and the
obstinate human bodies against which they are deployed. Thus, as sug-
gested in the introduction, Romero locates the intersection between the
cultural mechanisms of repression and those impulses that are repressed
within the physicality of the human body.
Thought of in this manner, the horror in Romero’s films emerges from
the unconstrained body—that body which is no longer subject to the
norms or laws that we believe constitute our reality. In some ways, this
unconstrained body can be seen at the center of most horror narratives,
and so both the reanimated corpse (which violates what we take to be
natural laws) and the sociopathic killer (who violates our cultural norms)
are equally monstrous.1 In the more traditional horror films, especially

17
 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

those appearing before Hitchcock’s seminal Psycho, the appearance of

the unconstrained body serves as a threat to the cultural structures of
civilization, and the subsequent narrative serves to reinforce and protect
those structures from that threat, which ultimately must be vanquished
to restore normalcy.2 In the 1980s, another form of unconstrained body
emerged around what scholars have called “body horror,” a subgenre
championed by filmmakers like David Cronenberg in which, as Philip
Brophy puts it, the film “plays not so much on the broad fear of Death,
but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and
relates to it.”3 In many of the films of Cronenberg—like The Brood (1979),
Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986)—the body takes on a fluid plastic-
ity through which both the physical and psychological integrity of the
victim is challenged. Cronenberg’s films, as with others of his era, employ
a fantastic body within which the laws of corporeal reality twist and bend
so that videotapes can be inserted into a human stomach (Videodrome)
or a person takes on the physical qualities of a housefly.
Romero’s films also use a version of body horror, though with a less
fantastic bent. While Romero’s films are filled with animated corpses,
they are generally still bound by the inevitable law of physical decay.
Where Cronenberg utilizes the fantastic body as a means of imagining
what Kelly Hurley calls “the human-becoming-other,” Romero’s bod-
ies function more as a point of critique of what the human has become
already.4 The body, in Romero’s films, serves as critical leverage through
which he seeks to pry loose certain tendencies in contemporary culture
for inspection and, often, condemnation. In this way, the cemetery and
the funeral rites performed within its confines mark an important initial
point of intervention for Romero.
As Charlton McIlwain notes, “From the time that human civiliza-
tions transitioned from nomadic life to permanent communal settle-
ments, the meaningfulness of death was marked by the living. Whether
a pile of rocks and sticks, vast pyramids, or large blocks of granite with
linguistic inscriptions, people throughout time have erected mediums
signifying the death of a member of the family, clan or larger human
community.” These spaces, in turn, became “a place of contemplation
for the living looking forward to their certain future, a place in which
they could maintain a continuing connection with the ancestral com-
munity.”5 The cemetery, then, can be thought of as a cultural space of
central importance, a place in which we maintain a connection with
our pasts but also a place in which we separate the living from the dead.
In this way, the cemetery represents the fine line we draw between past

18
 Introduction

and future and between body and self. For it is in the cemetery that we
maintain a special place for the material body that remains after whatever
human essence we believe in has departed, and for this reason we have
wrapped cemeteries and funerals with numerous and substantial rituals
designed, in part, to mark this passing—the passage of the body from
being a human to being just a body.
While the opening of Romero’s Night does not explicitly invoke the
long historical tensions surrounding the rites of death, the connection
becomes more evident at the mundane level, in the way people relate to
these rites. Funerals and cemetery visits mark a crucial ritual in most fam-
ily structures: the need to commemorate the absence of a relative through
the visitation of their “resting place.” It is for this reason that Johnny and
Barbara venture to the remote, rural cemetery on this particularly fateful
evening, to lay a wreath on the grave of their late father and to honor the
wishes of their mother, his widow. The tension surrounding this com-
memorative act is enhanced by Johnny’s reluctance to participate. As
they arrive to lay the recently purchased wreath at the gravestone, Johnny
reads its inscription, “We still remember,” before adding, “Well, I don’t.”
Later, as Barbara bows her head for a moment of silent prayer, Johnny
objects to the ritual: “Hey, c’mon Barb, church was this morning. Hey, I
mean, praying’s for church, c’mon.”
During this sequence, it is unclear how dedicated Barbara is to the
ritual of commemoration at her father’s grave, but she does her part as
dutiful daughter. During the scene, however, it is clear that Barbara and
Johnny have been performing this ritual for many years. Johnny recalls a
childhood prank—scaring Barbara by jumping from behind a tree near the
gravesite—and being scolded by his grandfather: “Boy, you’ll be damned
to hell,” Johnny recounts. At this point, it becomes evident that Barbara’s
childhood sense of unease has not diminished, and as Johnny begins to
replay his childhood prank—teasing her with “They’re coming to get you,
Barbara”—her irritation shows. The game continues as a figure comes
lumbering down the path, but then the seemingly innocent childish game
takes a turn neither Johnny nor Barbara could have expected as the crea-
ture does, indeed, seek to “get” Barbara.
Of course, the idea of a corpse pursuing people through a graveyard is
not especially groundbreaking, but as I’ve tried to suggest above, Romero’s
focus on the intricacies of the cultural and familial rituals of the cemetery
draw attention not only to the gothic nature of the space but also to its
cultural importance as line between the living and the dead. The motif of
the cemetery and the funeral is a powerful recurring theme in Romero’s

19
 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

films—indeed, as I discuss in more detail below, throughout his Living

Dead series of films, explicit tensions arise around the need to destroy
corpses and forego the normal methods of commemoration. In Night of
the Living Dead, for instance, a medical expert insists, “The bodies must
be carried to the street and burned. They must be burned immediately.
Soak them with gasoline and burn them. The bereaved will have to forego
the dubious comforts that a funeral service will give. They’re just dead
flesh and dangerous.” Much of the friction that leads the SWAT team
to assault the tenement building filled with survivors in the first act of
Dawn of the Dead is caused by the residents’ insistence on observing
funeral rites. As two of the protagonists find a basement filled with the
still-moving corpses of the living dead, one of them asks, “Why did these
people keep them here?” “Because they still believe there’s respect in
dying,” his companion replies.
The motif of the cemetery and the funeral appears in Romero’s other
films as well. His reframing of the Arthurian myth in Knightriders (1981)
concludes with a prolonged funeral for the king, and in The Dark Half
(1993), author Thad Beaumont attempts to end the career of his alter ego
George Stark by holding a fake burial in which the pseudonym is given a
proper burial plot. Indeed, our first sense that the alter ego is not going
without a fight is when we observe the disturbed pseudo-grave site. In
addition, one of the vignettes in Romero’s Creepshow (1982) focuses on
a family gathering to commemorate their dead father, and in his half of
Two Evil Eyes (1990)—the other half directed by Dario Argento—the plot
focuses on efforts to dispose of the murdered body of a woman’s elderly
husband. Overall, the cemetery and the funeral loom large throughout
Romero’s career and establish not only a consistent gothic tone but also a
preoccupation with the cultural practices that surround the human body
at the moment of its interment. More important, and really at the heart
of my reading of his films, is Romero’s consistent and critical attention
to the manner that culture and the body intersect.
One approach in articulating this idea is to think about the ways in
which humans are separated from animals. Rhetorical scholar Kenneth
Burke suggests that part of the core definition of the human is that he is
“separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own mak-
ing.”6 In other words, our artificial constructions create the very notion
of “human”—our language, culture, and points of view, as well as the
obvious material and technological constructions that separate us from
nature. Taken in this fashion, the artificial constructions of humanity
separate us from nature in two important ways, and both of these play

20
 Introduction

out in Romero’s films. First, we are separated from the forces of nature by
the comfortable environment maintained by our technologies. Whether
in the family home or at the shopping mall or in a military bunker, as
humans we huddle into our artificial environs as a means of separat-
ing ourselves from the potentially savage consequences of the natural
world, in which we are, for the most part, no longer suited to survive.
On a second level, however, we are also separated from our own nature.
The constructs of human culture—our laws, customs, rituals, attitudes,
values, and prejudices—all serve to constrain, confine, and inhibit our
otherwise natural biological functions. Born into these cultural systems,
we live lives that are largely defined by symbolic systems that are utterly
constructed prior to our entry into them.
These two observations, while not especially novel, set the stage for
thinking more about the place of the body—the corporeal reality of
human existence—at the intersection of culture and nature. More to the
point, my focus in this section will be on the ways this intersection not
only is manifested in Romero’s films but also in many ways becomes the
driving force for them. The body-as-intersection becomes, in Romero’s
films, the location of horror, which is to say the narrative and aesthetic
place in which those things repressed reappear and, thus, from which hor-
ror emanates into the rest of the film. Beyond the narrative and aesthetic
tendencies surrounding Romero’s use of the body is the interrelated way
that Romero uses the body to advance a particularly polemical politi-
cal critique. Or, to reiterate a point made earlier, across his filmmaking,
Romero utilizes the body—in all its decaying and putrefying reality—as
a wedge with which he pries out particular aspects of the contemporary
American political landscape. Romero’s rhetoric of political critique is,
of course, both most obvious and most celebrated in his series of Liv-
ing Dead films, and so the first chapter of this section addresses those
films. The second chapter attends to a trio of films produced at different
points in Romero’s career but all focusing on the body as a site of struggle
between deep impulses and motives and the cultural norms that seek to
keep them, and us, in check. The final chapter of this section turns to two
films that offer a more mythological perspective on Romero’s attention
to the body, his reworking of the Arthur legend in Knightriders and his
variation of the vampire story in Martin.

21
 1
The Body as Contrast: Romero’s Living Dead

It makes sense to begin with Romero’s Living Dead series. Not only have
these films been Romero’s most successful—both Night of the Living Dead
and Dawn of the Dead were major box office hits—but they have also been
his most critically acclaimed. Film critic Robin Wood, for instance, has
called Romero’s first two Living Dead films “among the most powerful,
fascinating and complex of modern horror films.”1 I take this series to
consist of four films: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of
the Dead, and Land of the Dead. The 2007 re-boot of the series, Diary
of the Dead, can be seen as a kind of coda not only to the Living Dead
series but to Romero’s entire body of work, and as such I read it more as
a reflection upon the preceding work than as part of the specific narra-
tive/rhetorical progression occurring in the four films that constitute the
Living Dead series proper. Additionally, Diary has begun a new series of
Living Dead films. At the time of this writing, Romero’s Survival of the
Dead debuted with limited theatrical release. Any sustained reflection
on these films will have to await their completion at some point in the
future. Therefore, in this chapter I focus only on the original Living Dead
series as it reflects Romero’s preoccupation with the unconstrained body
as a source of both horror and cultural critique.
The traditional Living Dead series deserves special attention because
the films appeared over an extended period of time that covered both
the rise and fall of what I called in the introduction the second golden
age of American horror. As noted, the critical and commercial success of
Night in 1968 stands at the beginning of this period of horror filmmak-
ing and is with little doubt the film that most dramatically influenced

22
 The Body as Contrast

the direction and tone of this era. The film also initiated the narrative
conceit that underwrites the subsequent films, namely that the dead are
returning to life and are seeking to devour the flesh of the living. Before
turning to my critical reading of Romero’s Living Dead films, it may be
worthwhile to lay out in broad terms the plots of these four linked though
very different films.
Night begins with Johnny and Barbara, a brother and sister visiting
their father’s grave. After an initial encounter with one of the living dead
in the cemetery scene, Johnny is knocked unconscious, but Barbara man-
ages to evade the ghoul and seeks shelter in an isolated farmhouse. The
strain proves too much for Barbara, and as she drifts into an almost
catatonic state, the narrative shifts attention to Ben, an African Ameri-
can man who shows up just in time to save Barbara from some of the
living dead. Ben proceeds to barricade the house and comfort Barbara,
but the number of living dead surrounding the house continues to grow.
Eventually, another group of survivors emerge from their hiding place
in the basement—a middle-aged white married couple, the Coopers, and
their injured daughter, along with another young couple, Tom and Judy.
The survivors bicker over their strategy, and the ensuing power struggle
between Ben and Mr. Cooper becomes a continuing source of instability
as they learn that the dead are coming back to life across the country.
When their attempt to escape goes horribly wrong—their one working
vehicle explodes, killing both Tom and Judy—the tensions boil over, and
Ben beats Mr. Cooper and then shoots him as the barricaded doors and
windows give way and the dead overrun the house. Eventually Ben is the
only survivor, having retreated to the basement, and as morning arrives,
the sound of gunshots from a rescue party draws him out of his hiding
place where he is suddenly and unceremoniously shot in the head by a
deputy who mistakes him for one of the living dead. The film’s abrupt
ending is accompanied by a series of chilling, grainy photographic stills
of Ben’s body being removed and cast upon a pyre.
After a series of unrelated and less commercially successful films,
Romero returned to the living dead in what would be his most com-
mercially successful film, and arguably most accomplished, Dawn of the
Dead. The picture appeared at what might be considered the apex of this
second golden age, 1978, a year that also saw the release of successful hor-
ror films like Halloween, Magic, and Omen II. Dawn picks up from the
events in Night, although it is clearly set in the mid-1970s. By this point,
the epidemic of living dead is overwhelming the country, and the film
begins in a TV studio as Fran, one of the producers, works with her col-

23
 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

leagues to try to get news of the catastrophe out to the public. As social
institutions seem to be falling apart, Fran and her boyfriend, Stephen, a
helicopter pilot, make plans to escape the city and head north. The scene
shifts to a SWAT assault on a tenement building in an effort to force the
residents to abandon their homes for government shelters. In the midst
of the aggressive police action and carnage, two officers, Roger and Peter,
meet up and decide to try to flee the city with Roger’s friends Stephen
and Fran. The quartet escape the city in a stolen television news helicop-
ter and decide to land on the roof of a large shopping mall where they
determine to remain, eventually securing the perimeter and disposing
of all the zombies within, though not before a fatal injury to Roger. The
remaining three settle into a comfortable though directionless life in the
mall until a marauding motorcycle gang invades, and in the ensuing battle
the mall is once again overrun by the living dead. Stephen is killed but
Fran makes her escape to the helicopter, and even though Peter initially
plans to commit suicide, in the end he joins her and they take to the air
with limited fuel supply and no clear plan for the future.
The rise of the Reagan era in the early 1980s saw the end of this particu-
larly creative and expansive period of horror filmmaking, and Romero’s
third film in the Living Dead series reflected this change in cultural
attitude and tastes. Released in 1985, Day of the Dead saw both a smaller
budget and lackluster performance at the box office. In spite of its lim-
ited resources and small scope, Day provides an interesting extension
of the claustrophobic aesthetic of the series. The film is set in an under-
ground military base on an island off the coast of Florida; the protagonist
is a scientist named Sarah. The base is filled with military personnel
and research scientists, and tension between the two groups begins to
escalate as they realize they may be the last survivors of the living dead
epidemic. Sarah’s attempts to keep tempers under control and mediate
the peace prove futile, and as a new officer takes charge of the military
detail, relations reach a breaking point. The scientists’ attempts to find
a solution—including the efforts by one scientist, nicknamed Doctor
Frankenstein, to domesticate the dead—are met with derision from the
military officers, who finally resolve to exert absolute control over the
facility and its occupants. The new commander, Captain Rhodes, intends
to leave the compound on the only helicopter and abandon the scientists,
but as his plans unfold, one of his soldiers, Private Salazar, thwarts him
by opening the security gates and allowing the dead to invade the base.
In the resulting chaos, Sarah escapes with two of the nonmilitary per-
sonnel, and the remaining officers are consumed by the dead. The film

24
 The Body as Contrast

concludes with Sarah and her companions on a deserted island awaiting

an uncertain future.
Due in part to the difficulties in making Day and to the poor reception
of the film, it took twenty years to film the follow-up Land of the Dead,
which appeared in 2005. While Land did not make a major impact at the
domestic box office, it was reasonably successful in the global market
and, perhaps as important, received exceptionally strong critical reviews.
Justin Chang, writing in Variety, insisted that the film resurrected the
“legendary franchise with top-flight visuals, terrific genre smarts and
tantalizing layers of implication.”2 The scope and budget were greatly
expanded with Land, and in it Romero presents a greater sense of the way
human society begins to reconstitute itself in the midst of the ongoing
rise of the living dead. In Land, we learn that humans have regrouped
into city-states, and one, which appears to be Pittsburgh, survives by
sending raiding parties out into the surrounding countryside to salvage
supplies from small towns still overrun by the living dead. The film fol-
lows the attempt by the leader of one of the raiding parties, Riley, to
escape the city and make his way north. Riley’s party is escorted by an
enormous armored vehicle called “Dead Reckoning,” equipped with mis-
siles, machine guns, and fireworks, which we learn have a mesmerizing
effect on the living dead. Riley’s efforts to flee are thwarted by the city’s
corrupt leader, Kaufman, who resides in a luxury apartment building
along with other of the elite, while most of the residents live in chaotic
slums just inside the city’s walls. The plot gains momentum when one of
Kaufman’s henchmen, Cholo, steals Dead Reckoning in hopes of extorting
money from the corrupt leader. As Riley and a small team head out to stop
Cholo from firing missiles into the city’s walls, legions of living dead make
their way toward the city in apparent retaliation for the numerous raids
into their territory. The film’s climax comes as the living dead breach the
walls, beginning a horrific attack on the city that leaves Kaufman dead
and his luxury fortress devastated. Riley and his team use the rescued
Dead Reckoning to open the city’s walls, allowing the trapped humans
to flee the living dead. As the residents begin to regroup, Riley and his
companions commence their journey north.
Importantly, Romero made several films in the periods in between his
Living Dead films, and in the next chapters of this section I turn to these
other films. But considering the four Living Dead films together allows
for at least three critical advantages. First, given the dispersion of these
films across his long career, we can use the Living Dead films to trace the
progression of Romero’s vision as a filmmaker. While the Living Dead

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

films are not sequels in the specific sense of following the adventures of
particular individuals, they do provide a narrative that traces the broader
apocalyptic events of the rise of the living dead. Second, if Romero’s Liv-
ing Dead films are indeed, as Reynold Humphries notes, a “a full-scale
criticism of American values,” then each of the films should provide an
interesting insight into ways that Romero’s critiques adjusted as Ameri-
can culture changed.3 Certainly, the varying political/cultural climate in
which each of these films emerged (1968, 1978, 1985, and 2005) suggests
that each film evidences a unique political critique. Finally, the Living
Dead series provides Romero’s most sustained and spectacular use of the
body as a rhetorical trope for cultural critique.
The body in all its decomposing and devouring fragility occupies the
central position in Romero’s Living Dead series. The anonymous and
largely characterless undead legions who roam through Romero’s four
films seeking to consume the flesh of the living serve as crucial elements
in his broader critique of American culture, and for this reason it is use-
ful to put Romero’s zombies in their proper historical context. Romero
was not the first to include undead creatures or even to feature zombies,
but his zombies are unique: he was among the first to envision zombies
who seek to devour the flesh of the living and, in so doing, infect their
victims. As Joshua Gunn and Shaun Treat observe in their reading of
zombies and critical theory, the earlier generation of zombies had been
automatons controlled by some overlord. Romero’s ghouls were different:
“Although the ghoul figure is still somewhat lethargic and slow-moving
like the zombie, it also possesses something that was previously absent:
an uncontrollable desire to consume.” 4 This unique intersection meant
that zombies imperiled not only the individual confronted with one but
the whole of humanity. In this way, Romero combined within his living
dead both the gothic undead creatures from horror’s classic phase and
the invasion hysteria of the 1950s creature features.
This combination represents more than just the creation of a novel
monster; in a fundamental way, it ushered in a new aesthetic and poli-
tics of horror. The gothic monsters of the 1930s and 1940s not only were
figures from classic literature but also, at the time of their initial release,
symbolized the deep fractures emerging in the American way of life. The
year Dracula, Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde premiered, 1931,
was one of the worst years of the Great Depression, and the coming years
would see not only dark economic days but also the dramatic resurgence
of tensions in Europe.5 The gothic monsters, especially Dracula and Fran-
kenstein, stood as a fundamental symbol of the collapse of cultural order

26
 The Body as Contrast

as these living dead creatures transgressed and, indeed, inverted the most
natural of orders—the separation of the living and the dead.
The creature features of the 1950s were shaped by a different era—one
in which the fundamental pillars of American culture were not so much
collapsing as threatened from without. The Cold War culture was one of
heightened fear on the verge of hysteric paranoia, and the fundamental
apprehension was of invasion by Soviet forces, either though overt mili-
tary attack or through covert infiltration.6 Thus, at the same time the
United States was engaged in an arms race to secure military superior-
ity over its Communist adversaries, there were intensive investigations
designed by government institutions like the House Un-American Activi-
ties Committee to root out Communist sympathizers within the country.
At the heart of this hysteria was Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from
Wisconsin, whose paranoid diatribes launched accusations of Communist
infiltration at everyone from Ivy League faculty and Hollywood directors
and studio heads to those in the Department of the Army and the inner
circle of the Eisenhower administration. While McCarthy’s meteoric rise
to public prominence would be equaled by his spectacular demise, the
general tone of paranoia and fear of invasion would resonate in American
culture, especially on film, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps the
most dramatic representation of these anxieties was in the seemingly end-
less series of films focused on some form of alien invasion. Ushered into
prominence in 1951 with the near simultaneous release of The Thing from
Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, the creature features
dominated horror in the 1950s and provided an allegorical perspective
on the very real fears of invasion.
In Night of the Living Dead, Romero cleverly conjoins these two hor-
ror tropes to create living dead creatures that also constitute a kind of
invasion—at least in the sense of a contagion that begins to overwhelm
the populace. Interestingly in this regard, Romero combines two com-
mon threats from the sci-fi creature features. Some alien invaders, like
the original Howard Hawks version of The Thing, came to use humans
as food, and others, like the seedpods from Don Siegel’s 1954 Invasion of
the Body Snatchers, came to take over people’s minds and consume their
very humanity. Romero’s living dead perform both functions through
graphic acts of consumption, and, importantly, the living dead in these
films consume an individual’s humanity by virtue of consuming his or
her bodily flesh. But before turning more fully to the central place of
the body in Romero’s vision of horror, it is worth considering one other
generic precedent: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

27
 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

As noted in the introduction, Psycho served as the catalyst for most

of the progressive and innovative horror filmmaking of the 1960s and
1970s, and without a doubt both Psycho and Hitchcock’s follow-up film
The Birds (1963) served as important influences on Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead. But in terms of the broader generic features of the horror
film, Psycho added a crucial element to the earlier gothic and creature
feature influences. With Psycho, Hitchcock located the corrupting nature
of horror inside instead of outside. In previous versions of the horror
genre, the encroaching horror came from without—either from some
supernatural past, as in the gothic genre, or from some inhuman future,
as in science fiction. With Psycho, however, Hitchcock drew attention
to the rottenness at the center of American culture. Efforts to protect
American culture from external threats had left the center unobserved,
and in Hitchcock’s vision, something unnatural and perverse had grown
inside the country. Psycho, in this way, can be read as a critique of the
American dream of the suburban 1950s and 1960s—a dream that sought
to get away from the complications of life in the city and find a “private
island” of seclusion for the isolated nuclear family. It was this dream that
led Marion Crane out onto that secluded California highway, and it was
a nightmarish version of the isolated family unit that she encountered
at the Bates Motel.7
All of these generic precedents find their way into Romero’s Living
Dead series. The rise of the living dead represents a most fundamen-
tal inversion of cultural order—a world turned upside-down in which
the dead consume the living—as well as an invading force that must be
defended against. Indeed, at least in Night there are some vague allusions
to radiation from a returning space probe as the cause of the epidemic,
a clear gesture to the immediate precedent of the creature features. But
at the heart of the narrative in all four films is a sense that the inability
of humans to cooperate and coexist ultimately leads to their demise. In
each film, the climactic chaos and bloodbath result not so much from
the invading living dead as from the inability of the human characters
to work together, and more to the point, these divisions are inevitably
drawn along lines derived from broader American cultural tendencies.
In Night, for instance, the bickering between Ben, the African American
protagonist, and the older white man Harry Cooper creates the real ten-
sion in the house during the film’s second half. The fragile domestic space
within which the seven humans seek refuge marks their last hope to hold
out against the living dead. But whatever chance these survivors might
have is lost as the two adult males vie for superiority. When Tom implores

28
 The Body as Contrast

them, “We’d all be better off if all three of us were working together,” it is
clear that he speaks not only to the momentary obstacle but also to any
long-term possibility for survival. The fragile human bonds that might
have allowed for survival against the rising of the living dead prove unten-
able due not so much to the growing number of creatures outside but to
the failure of human relations inside—a sentiment that must have felt
palpable amid the social chaos and violence of the late 1960s.
Similarly, in one of the opening scenes in Dawn of the Dead, news-
room crew and anchors argue loudly with government experts about
the parameters of the growing epidemic, and Fran exclaims to no one in
particular, “We’re blowing it ourselves!” It is this sense of hopelessness
that leads Fran to join her three male compatriots in rejecting the protec-
tion afforded by official sanctuary; they instead take to the air in their
stolen helicopter in search of their own safety, although, ultimately, her
words prove prophetic of the collapse of their safe space. While the dead
continue to pose a threat to the isolated survivors in their shopping mall
shelter, it is their inability to form relations with the motorcycle gang
that leads to the film’s bloody climax. The same inability to cooperate
results in the seemingly inevitable slaughter at the conclusion of Day of
the Dead as well. Even more ironically, the survivors in this third film
are ensconced in a military bunker on an island and by all appearances
are safe from the incursion of the dead, but, as in the other films, it is the
internal squabbling—this time between the research scientists and the
military guard assigned to protect them—that leads to their demise.The
most transparent critique of human relations comes in the most recent of
the Living Dead films, Land of the Dead. In the narrative progression, by
the time of this fourth film, humans have begun reconstituting something
like our contemporary society within their walled city-states. So even with
the ever-impending threat of the living dead who continue to roam the
areas outside the city, within its walls an approximation of the modern
world—albeit a distorted exaggeration of it—exists. Within the city, the
inequality between rich and poor has taken on epic proportions, with
the poor scraping through in anarchic slums that resemble something
out of George Miller’s Road Warrior (1981) while the elites live within a
protected luxury skyscraper called Fiddler’s Green. Life within the Green
bears such a striking resemblance to contemporary American affluence
that it almost seems anachronistic. Residents of the Green live in luxury
apartments, wear designer clothes, shop in expensive boutiques, and even
seem to enjoy haute cuisine and fine coffees. Of course, it is the division
between rich and poor as well as between living and dead that drives the

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

film toward its inevitable ending, and eventually the clean and high-tech
halls of the Green become a trap within which the wealthy denizens
become victims of the onslaught of the living dead.
In each of Romero’s films, it is the bonds of human relations that fail,
and such failure leads to bloody conclusions. As Gunn and Treat observe,
“Romero’s Living Dead located evil within the repressed impulses of a
flawed humanity rather than in some other tyrannical agent or super-
natural beyond.”8 Because of their flawed humanity, Romero’s protago-
nists can do little to escape the unconstrained bodies that emerge to
consume them.
In the end, the shelters sought by the humans cannot be maintained,
and it is interesting to observe the progression of refuges sought by the
survivors across the four films. In each subsequent film, the sanctuary
sought by the living becomes more impressive and seemingly impreg-
nable, though ultimately they are still futile. In Night, an isolated country
house provides momentary shelter to the band of survivors, and it is
notable that none of the seven humans is the owner of this home; they
simply find themselves barricaded into a domestic space that is not theirs
and are forced to either band together to confront the challenges facing
them or fragment and fall apart, which is indeed their fate.

Ben holds off the siege of living dead in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).

30
 The Body as Contrast

On one level, there seems a clear message about the failure of the
domestic structure fashioned around the nuclear family. The domestic
space of the house in Night becomes more a scene of internal strife than
any genuine safe haven, and the one actual family unit that finds itself
within the house, the Coopers, paints a fairly grim picture of familial
relations. After arguing with Ben, the film’s ostensible protagonist, over
whether it is safer to remain on the top floor or hide in the basement (Coo-
per’s preferred strategy), Mr. Cooper retreats to the basement where he
sulks with his wife and ailing daughter. As he and his wife argue about his
insistence to stay locked in the basement, she responds, “We may not enjoy
living together, but dying together isn’t going to solve anything.” A more
graphic symbol of the failing nuclear family comes in the film’s climactic
moments when the Coopers’ young daughter, who had been bit on the arm
by one of the living dead, transforms into one of them. As Mrs. Cooper
descends the stairs to see about her mortally wounded husband—who
had been shot by Ben in their power struggle over the domestic space of
the house—she finds the girl feeding on her slain father’s body. In a scene
that is a clear nod to Hitchcock’s shower-murder, the daughter brutally
murders her mother with a garden spade, the spade plunging down in
shadowy silhouette as the blood splatters on the wall.
It is worth noting here that the Coopers are the last traditional nuclear
family to appear in the Living Dead series. Whatever bonds of protection
might have been afforded by the family unit are shown stripped bare of
their pretensions and revealed for what they are: the young will devour
their elders just as the new society will rise to overwhelm the old. Indeed,
even the pretense of the traditional family structure is absent in the sub-
sequent films. In Dawn, for instance, when the helicopter pilot Stephen
proposes to Fran, she rebuffs his gesture: “We can’t Stephen, not now. It
wouldn’t be real.” At the film’s conclusion, Fran, whom we learn is preg-
nant, escapes the now overrun mall but not with Stephen, who is torn to
pieces by the zombie hoards. Her companion at the film’s conclusion is
Peter, the African American police officer. While the interracial coupling
is intriguing in light of the racial tensions of the 1970s, what is also notable
is the lack of any romantic trappings in this scene. Peter and Fran survive
and escape, and whatever affiliation they will form, presumably at some
point including Fran’s child, shows no sign of resembling anything like
the traditional family.9
Perhaps part of the reason that the notion of family is portrayed in
such vacant terms in Dawn is that the film is ultimately about the notion
of happiness in the America of the 1970s, an era that was largely hostile

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

to traditional family values. In this regard, it is telling that the small

band of survivors in Dawn find refuge not in some domestic dwelling
but in a shopping mall, the ultimate symbol of the kind of narcissistic
consumerism that Romero seems to be targeting in the film. Indeed, the
most striking element of Dawn is not the dramatic opening act, in which
the quartet of survivors escape the city and secure their safe haven in
the shopping mall, or the bloody conclusion, in which a motorcycle gang
breaches their sanctuary, allowing the throngs of undead into the mall,
but the extended middle act, in which the survivors’ joy at finding the
abundant resources of the mall slowly drifts into malaise. The jubilant
scenes of an extended shopping spree in which the foursome have their
pick of designer clothes, fancy foods, and even the cash drawers at a
local bank—“You never know,” Peter confides—are soon replaced by an
extended period of boredom and the slow recognition that their lives
have lost meaning and purpose.
If in Night, it is the domestic space and social structure of the fam-
ily that has lost its capacity to ground and protect us, in Dawn it is the
consumer space and capitalist structure of the mall that has failed. The
old adage of being careful what you wish for echoes throughout the film
as the survivors find themselves trapped within the utopian dream of
late capitalism—a consumer space in which all their needs are fulfilled.
A similar failure occurs in Day, a film in which the survivors have a
greater degree of perceived agency—they are military officers and scien-
tists bunkered into a government research facility and charged with find-
ing a cure for the epidemic of living dead. But here again, just as the safe
space of the family and of capitalism fails, so too does the nation-state.
Released during the height of the Reagan era and its emphasis on hyper-
nationalism and the dominance of the strong male/father figure, Day
offers a sustained critique of the patriarchal-military cultural complex.
The protection afforded by this military space and its armed cadre of men
ultimately implodes, and it is the tension arising between the military and
the scientists they are charged with protecting that leads to their demise.
The mid-1980s was the era of what Susan Jeffords has referred to as “hard
body” films, that variation of action-adventure films in which muscle-
bound men, usually current or ex-military, take on overwhelming odds
to restore American pride and virtue.10 Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood,
for example, had been released in 1982, and its sequel Rambo was released
in the same year as Day. Romero inverts the perceived safety of this
masculine and militarized vision of nationalism by turning the military
center into an anxious space of frustration and, ultimately, impotence.

32
 The Body as Contrast

In a gesture similar to ones in other post-Vietnam era films, like Francis

Ford Coppolla’s Apocalypse Now (1979), the military commander snaps
and becomes an even greater threat to the protagonists than the zombies
outside. In this regard, it is fitting that the protagonist in Day is a strong
female character, Sarah, who not only rejects the sexual innuendos and
harassment doled out by the soldiers but demonstrates throughout the
film a unique blend of strength and compassion that stands at odds with
the brute force epitomized by her military surroundings. In the end, only
Sarah and two civilian helicopter pilots, John and McDermott, survive
the film’s final violent moments.

Soldier and scientist bicker in their bunker in Romero’s Day of the Dead.
Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).

Land of the Dead, as noted, is both more expansive and in some ways
more transparent in its political critique of American culture. In Land,
the sanctuary in which the human survivors live has become a microcosm
of contemporary society, replete with military protection, economic dis-
parity, and political corruption. But arguably the most interesting move
in Romero’s fourth Living Dead film is his choice to begin the picture
within a different kind of social space—the village of the dead. The film’s
plot is sparked in large part by the intervention of the human raiders into
the seemingly idyllic village of the dead, and so it is the humans who
provoke their own destruction. In this regard, the shadow of September
11 and America’s subsequent “war on terror” looms large. One way to read

33
 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

Romero’s film, especially his almost sympathetic portrayal of the legions

of the living dead, is to suggest that the ending death and destruction is
the result of the humans’ own actions—“the chickens coming home to
roost,” to borrow the metaphor used by Malcolm X to explain the assas-
sination of President Kennedy.
In this way, Big Daddy, the apparent leader of the living dead who
rallies his undead compatriots for their assault on the city, stands in for
any number of revolutionary leaders who have rejected their subordinate,
colonized status. It is worth noting here that in many ways, Big Daddy,
the hulking African American zombie who leads the zombie uprising, is
typical of Romero’s protagonists. In each of the three preceding films, at
least one of the main characters has been African American—Ben, Peter,
and John. In addition, if Big Daddy can be read as an allegory for the upris-
ing of third world nations against the dominance of the industrialized
north, it is telling that he is the first to break the spell of the fireworks.
In Land of the Dead, one of the strategies used by the human raiding
parties is to launch “sky flowers,” bright bursting fireworks, into the sky.
These lights seem to mesmerize the living dead, but during the opening
raiding sequence, it is Big Daddy who pulls his attention away from these
distracting lights and focuses instead on the human-wrought carnage
decimating his quaint and tranquil village. His political consciousness
now raised, Big Daddy displays many of the qualities of a revolutionary
leader—bravery, compassion, and an unerring commitment to seeking
revenge on his human oppressors. It is also noteworthy that Big Daddy
was evidently a gas station attendant in life and continues to behave as
one in his living death, suggesting, perhaps obliquely, a connection to
the Middle East and America’s ongoing dependence on petroleum-based
fuels. In this regard, both by beginning the film from the point of view of
the living dead and by painting Big Daddy in a potentially sympathetic
manner, Romero seems to be pushing us to question our straightforward
response to the terrorist attacks upon America and forcing us to question
who, ultimately, are the victims and who the aggressors.
Land of the Dead is fortunately not simplistic in its rendering of the
causes and consequences of violence, but it is clear that the film indicts
what one might call the hubris of perceived power and superiority. The
human hubris, especially that of the elites living in the luxury of Fiddler’s
Green, proves unsustainable. This arrogance is also revealed in the callous
attitude displayed by Kaufman, the city’s corrupt founder and leader, to
the denizens of the city living in the borderland between the luxury tower
and the city’s protective walls. Revolutionary tensions also build among

34
 The Body as Contrast

the humans in the slums surrounding Fiddler’s Green. Mulligan, a leader

of this political insurgency, asks a crowd of listeners, “How long are you
going to let Kaufman push you around? Do you like shining his shoes and
pressing his pants? He didn’t build that place”—gesturing to the luxury
tower—“he just took it over!” We later learn he has been imprisoned by
Kaufman and his military thugs as the city’s leader exerts his control:
“He’s got his fingers in everything here. If you can drink it, shoot it up,
fuck it, gamble on it, it belongs to him,” we are told.
The bloodshed toward which the plot has been inexorably moving is,
thus, the result of both the imperialist (almost colonialist) arrogance dis-
played by those within the city and the internal divisions and inequities
festering among the humans within its protective walls. Tellingly, it is a
combination of these that ultimately kills Kaufman himself. When Cholo,
one of Kaufman’s henchmen, seeks to cash in on his long years of service
and retire to one of the luxury apartments, he is rebuffed: “I’m sorry,
Mr. DeMora, but there’s a very long waiting list. . . . This is an extremely
desirable location and space is limited.” “You mean restricted?” Cholo, a
Latino played by John Leguizamo, responds, observing the racial slight.
It is this humiliation that leads Cholo to hijack the armored vehicle Dead
Reckoning and threaten the city with a retaliatory missile attack, and
even when this plan is thwarted by Riley, the film’s protagonist, Cholo
continues to seek revenge. Having been bitten by one of the living dead,
Cholo makes his way into the city and, amid the chaos of the assault,
finds Kaufman attempting to flee via an underground car park. As the
now undead Cholo attacks Kaufman, it is Big Daddy who delivers the
final blow—hurtling a flaming barrel down into the garage and igniting
an explosion that tears both Kaufman and Cholo to pieces.
The shelters sought by the living during all four of the Living Dead
films suggest the moving target of Romero’s critique. From the domestic,
familial spaces in Night to the consumer spaces of Dawn, Romero has con-
sistently depicted the sanctuary sought by his surviving bands of humans
in ways that reveal much about the cultural contexts in which his films
emerged: the troubled generational and racial relations of the late 1960s,
the consumerist narcissism of the late 1970s, the macho nationalism of
the mid-1980s, and America’s status as “superpower” in a post-9/11 world.
The eventual failure of each site is brought about by the self-same cultural
tendencies that made it a sanctuary in the first place.11 So the military
safety of the bunker in Day is unraveled by the same masculine aggression
that provides it, and the consumer space of Dawn is compromised by the
same greed that made it desirable in the first place. The unsustainable

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

nature of each refuge is, ultimately, a sign of the fragile human relations
that both made it and, in the end, unmake it.
The fragility of human relations marks a useful entry point into think-
ing more specifically about the ways the body functions in Romero’s films.
The threat in each film is driven largely by the narrative conceit that once
the integrity of a person’s body is violated by one of the living dead, he
or she will inevitably become one of them. In an ironic sense, this is not
the usual threat in a horror film, which is to be killed. Victims of the liv-
ing dead are not so much in danger of dying as in losing what is believed
to constitute their humanity, and this is ultimately a matter of losing
one’s attachment to the cultural constraints that make up our sense of
civilization and ourselves as human beings. In this way, as I suggested
earlier, the living dead are unconstrained bodies—bodily entities that
exist outside the constraints on behavior dictated by cultural norms. The
description of the dead within the various films makes this explicit. A
scientist in Dawn describes the dead as “pure motorized instinct,” and in
Day they are described by “Doctor Frankenstein” as acting out of “deep,
dark primordial instinct.” In the most rudimentary sense, the dead are
unconstrained appetite—their only substantial motivation through at
least the first three films is to consume the flesh of the living who, in
turn, become living dead. As Gunn and Treat observe, Romero’s living
dead are outside the structures of ideology, or are pre-ideological in Louis
Althusser’s sense, and represent “the individual who has yet to become
self-conscious or called into the service of larger social organization,
community or the state.”12 These unconstrained bodies, in other words,
not only occupy the space outside the cultural parameters of repression
but also threaten to pull their victims into the same unconstrained space.
What makes this all the more disturbing is that the dead are not
entirely inhuman but in general appear and even in some ways behave
as living human beings. As Kim Paffenroth notes in his fascinating study
Gospel of the Living Dead, “What makes zombies more terrifying than
other monsters is that this confusing resemblance of zombies to normal
people never goes away.”13
Perhaps the most poignant description comes in Dawn. When Fran
asks, “What the hell are they?” Peter replies simply, “They’re us, that’s all.”
It is in Dawn that the dead serve as a most insightful critique of American
culture, and it is hard to watch the sequences of the living dead rambling
through the halls of the Monroeville Mall without reflecting on similar
behavior occurring in malls across the country. Indeed, throughout the
four films in the Living Dead series, the dead become increasingly similar

36
 The Body as Contrast

to their human counterparts. Where they are just a lumbering mob in

Night, by Dawn they return to the mall out of some vague memory of its
importance, and in Day the dead begin to learn and adapt. The progress
of the character Bub, a zombie being domesticated by one of the scientists
and arguably one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, demon-
strates the continued ability of the dead to learn and also their growing
agency within the films. Bub not only learns behaviors but also reveals a
seemingly genuine affection for Doctor Frankenstein, his trainer. When
Frankenstein is murdered by Captain Rhodes, it is Bub who tracks down
the military man and shoots him.

Zombies return to the shopping mall that defined their lives in Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).
Once again, the most transparent move along these lines comes in
Land, in which the living dead not only continue to exist outside the
confines of the city but have begun to construct their own unique sense
of community and communal relations. Our first sight of the living dead
occurs in an almost serene village as various living dead go about their
remembered routines—attending the gas station, playing in a band at
the local park, and wandering the streets. It is the marauding and greedy
human raiders who break this tranquility. The attack on the village of the
dead by the humans leads to the horrific revenge by the living dead, and it
is the fragility of the stratified society of the city that leaves it ultimately
vulnerable to the onslaught.

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

In this way, the living dead are not so much the antithesis of human
beings as their residue, that which remains after the cultural notions
of domesticity, greed, power, and the like are stripped away. What the
potential victims of the living dead fear is not so much that they will die
but that those cultural ideas that give them identity will be stripped away
and that they will become another anonymous and unconstrained body.
This loss of identity and differentiation is also bound up in the physical
decomposition of the dead and in the way they are treated by the living.
The dead are in the most literal sense abject—objects of such disgust
and repulsion that they are shunned by all. To be in proximity to one of
the living dead is to put one’s self in danger not so much of death but of
becoming one of them, of losing that very sense of self. The living dead
are such objects of repulsion that they must not even be, as noted earlier,
submitted to burial rites but must, as we are informed again and again
throughout the films, be shot in the head and burned.
It is notable in this regard that as the films progress, the living dead
become more and more repulsive and horrific in their physical appear-
ance. At one level, this makes narrative sense in that the longer the living
dead continue their undead existence, the more their physical bodies
will decompose. But, at another level, the degree of decomposition and
its depiction within the films are also means of underscoring the ways in
which the dead stand in contrast to the culture they are disrupting. Julia
Kristeva, in her influential book The Powers of Horror, makes the point
that “by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise
area of their culture in order to remove it.”14 In Kristeva’s thinking, the
notion of the abject, those things considered so repulsive and base that
they must be shunned, provides a crucial foundation for the construction
of our cultural ways of understanding the world. Encounters with the
abject become threats to this understanding, and in this regard the corpse
is a prime example of an object that is a threat because it undermines
our sense of ourselves as unique living subjects. As Kristeva argues, the
corpse confronts us with the material reality of death through its repul-
sive corporeal reality—“these bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit,” she
writes, “are what life withstands.”15
While the appearance of the living dead clearly provides an instance
of abjection, in the sense of confronting us with the limitations of our
cultural sense of identity and order, it is notable that Romero’s depictions
of these creatures evolve along the lines of his specific critiques. In Night,
for instance, most of the living dead are not noticeably different than any
average group of people and are differentiated more by their actions than

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 The Body as Contrast

by their appearance. In this way, the group of living dead surrounding the
farmhouse bears a striking resemblance to real instances of mob violence.
The image of this large group of noticeably white bodies surrounding the
house and the African American protagonist plays out within a cultural
context in which contemporary lynch mobs and southern police perpe-
trated very real acts of violence. By the time of Dawn, the living dead are
much more decomposed and graphic, but their wounds and discolor-
ations are almost cartoonish. In his insightful book on Romero’s films,
Tony Williams observes the strong influence that horror comics, espe-
cially EC Comics, had on Romero’s filmmaking aesthetic, and in Dawn
this almost garish cartoon aesthetic is most evident.16 But there is also
a kind of artificiality in the wounds of the living dead that underscores
Romero’s critique of the artificiality of consumer culture in the 1970s. The
clear contrast comes in Day. Here the cartoon aesthetic is gone and the
living dead are much more graphic and realistic. The bright red blood of
Dawn is replaced by much darker and more gruesome decomposition.
These graphic effects also parallel changes in the narrative aesthetic.17
Dawn, it is worth recalling, is filled with moments of anarchic parody that
almost lampoon the horror of the film itself. As the biker gang invades the
mall in which the protagonists have holed up, a mass of zombies invade
the space as well. In the midst of the melee, the bikers begin hitting zom-
bies in the face with cream pies and seltzer water. The incongruity of the
pie fight, occurring as it does in the midst of the climactic conflict, is a
prime example of Romero’s intentional tongue-in-cheek aesthetic. This
playfulness is entirely gone in Day, and the narrative, like the effects, is
decidedly darker and grittier.
The aesthetic presentation of the abject reanimated corpses in Rome-
ro’s films thus provides an escalating critique of humanity’s, and especially
America’s, sense of identity and order. As Anne Marie Smith notes, “The
abject is closely bound up with questions of identity, boundary crossing,
exile and displacement,”18 and when confronted with these abject entities,
the survivors in Romero’s films must flee their normal lives, their sense
of order, and seek new identities and new ways of making sense of their
world. In each film, the effort of the human survivors to cling to the old
order (whether family, capitalism, nationalism, or imperialism) ultimately
fails, and those who survive do so by abandoning their old ways and seek-
ing something new. It is interesting to note that three of the films end
with the remaining protagonists setting out on a journey without a clear
sense of where they are going or what they will encounter. At the end of
Dawn, Fran and Peter take off into the night sky in their helicopter, and

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

at the end of Day, Sarah removes to a desert island to begin a new life
with John and McDermott. In Day, John bemoans the endless caverns
of archives surrounding the military bunker. The miles of records have
become a tombstone to a civilization that no longer matters. He explains
his plan: “We could start over, start fresh. Get some babies and teach
them, Sarah, teach them never to come over here and dig these records
out.” Land ends in a similar fashion—Riley and his ragtag group of sur-
vivors are offered a chance to stay and rebuild the city in the aftermath
of the zombie attack but choose instead to head to the undiscovered
territories to the north. Only in Night are we left with no survivor—the
traumatic ending in which protagonist Ben is unceremoniously shot in
the head by one of the members of the rescue party is one of the most
shocking aspects of Romero’s first film. Undoubtedly, this traumatic end-
ing reflects the era in which it was released; 1968 was a year that saw most
of the more optimistic impulses of the previous years come to sudden,
often violent ends. But in another way, Ben’s overwhelming instinct to
survive and return to normal life prevents him from leaving his shelter
behind, from changing, and in the end the authorities he hopes will come
to save him spell his doom.
With the exception of Night, Romero’s films reveal a marked ambiva-
lence about the prospects for a new humanity arising out of the destruc-
tion of the old ways of life. The confrontation between culture and its
abject, animalistic other—the unconstrained bodies of the devouring
dead—leaves enormous amounts of carnage in its wake, but in the latter
three films there is the possibility, however slim, that something new
might emerge. Interestingly, while these ambivalent endings leave some
room for optimism and hope, Romero avoids sentimentalizing characters’
survival or providing any romantic overtones.
In this regard, it is noteworthy that romance is decidedly absent in the
Living Dead series. The only genuinely romantic moment occurs between
Tom and Judy in Night. The couple has an intimate conversation in which
Judy expresses her reluctance about the plan as Tom prepares to follow
Ben into their daring and ultimately doomed escape attempt, and indeed
it is Judy’s romantic impulse to join them that leads to her death as both
she and Tom are consumed first by their truck’s exploding gas tank and
then by the gathered living dead.
The closest thing to an intimate scene appears in Dawn, though the
romantic trappings are clearly absent. After Fran has refused Stephen’s
proposal, the couple are seen lying in bed, staring distractedly out into
space, though it is unclear if this is a postcoital moment or if the couple

40
 The Body as Contrast

has simply abandoned the possibility of a meaningful sexual connection.

Romero’s interest in the body, it would seem, does not extend to the sexual
or sexualized body. Sarah, the female protagonist in Day, faces relent-
less abuse for the supposedly sexual relationship she shares with Private
Salazar, though there is little in their on-screen interactions to suggest an
intimate relationship based on anything but Sarah’s pity for the rapidly
unraveling Salazar. The two survivors Sarah ultimately escapes with are
coded in ways that suggest theirs is a homosexual relationship.19 John and
McDermott, the helicopter pilot and radio operator, live apart from the
other residents of the bunker in a recreational vehicle stored in one of the
base’s enormous caverns. While there is nothing explicit between the two
men, their cohabitation and clear affection for each other is notable, and
when Sarah first visits their home, she comments, “You’re a mystery to
me.” That Sarah finds her potential new life with these ambiguously paired
men may suggest something of Romero’s disdain for traditional domestic
relations and a desire to push beyond traditional, cultural constraints.
Romero’s contempt of sentimentality is also evident in the final
moments of Land. The strong male and female protagonists—Riley and
Slack—share the strongest chemistry of any of his pairings, and there
is something of a flirtatious relationship between them. But in the end,
as Riley and Slack leave together, they are part of a broad, multicultural
ensemble of survivors that resembles one of Howard Hawks’s band of
companions more than any traditional romantic pairing. Paralleling the
departing band of humans is a long line of the living dead who also make
their way out of the ruined city. As one of the crew of Dead Reckoning
prepares to launch a missile at the line of zombies, Riley and the zombie
leader Big Daddy exchange a long look before Riley orders his crew to stand
down: “They’re just looking for someplace to go, same as us.” By the end of
Land, it appears even the living dead must seek some new way of being.
It is fitting that in this latest and potentially last installment of his origi-
nal Living Dead films, Romero ends with parallel lines of living humans
and zombies leaving the destruction of their old ways of life in search of
some new direction. Throughout all four films, it has been the encounter
between these two—the living and the dead—that has both motivated the
plot and, as I’ve tried to argue above, generated a critique of contemporary
cultural norms. In this way, one might argue that the living dead do not
so much stand for something—at least until Land, where they do begin
to take on a particular political valence—as stand against something.
In the majority of these films, the dead stand as that point of contrast,
the dialectical antithesis that unsettles our very notion of humanity.

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

Importantly, Romero’s critiques in these films are not wholly existential

but particularly interested in their contemporary context so that as the
film series progresses, the critical edge shifts focus to attend to those
cultural norms and constraints especially pressing at the time of their
release. The changing political targets, however, have not altered Romero’s
rhetorical strategy. Romero’s abject living dead are entities that not only
repel and horrify but also threaten to consume the very humanity of their
victims. From domestic human relations to nationalistic militarism, the
living dead have served as a polemic contrast that confronts and ulti-
mately unsettles the defining cultural norms of America. In this way, it is
the body—that unconstrained material residue that stands outside human
culture—that lies at the center of Romero’s critical cinema.

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 2
The Body as Site of Struggle: The Crazies,
Monkey Shines, The Dark Half, Bruiser

George Romero’s attention to the body is not limited to the shambling

figures of the living dead, and in a way, it is his other films, those not in the
Living Dead series, that provide a wider sense of his preoccupation with
the body. The persistence of this preoccupation is evident, for example,
in his 1973 picture The Crazies, Romero’s fourth theatrical release. In
many ways, The Crazies resembles Romero’s Living Dead films—the plot is
centered around the accidental discharge of a military biological weapon
codenamed Trixie, a chemical that drives people insane. Throughout the
film, the affected population slowly turns into a mass of hysterical indi-
viduals, often seen roaming around distractedly. As with the Living Dead
films, the official response—a military blockade of the town and an effort
to quarantine the rapidly degenerating population—seems draconian
and generally more menacing than the infected themselves. Indeed, the
main plot of The Crazies follows a small group of people as they seek to
evade the military officials and make their way out of the affected area.
What makes The Crazies a particularly interesting narrative experience
is that we are, in essence, invited to root for a group of individuals that,
should they succeed, will likely spread a deadly, mind-altering virus to
the entire population. The theme of contagion in The Crazies resembles
that of the Living Dead films, though here the infected are not raven-
ous, decaying corpses but generally gentle humans who have simply lost
control of their senses. On the surface, the “crazies” within the town are
nothing like the bloody horrors of the living dead, but in a fundamental

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way, they resemble the living dead in that they are also bodies no longer
constrained or defined by cultural norms. Indeed, in a way the crazies rep-
resent an expanded sense of the unconstrained body in that they display a
wider spectrum of desires and appetites than the generally single-minded
zombies of Romero’s Living Dead films. The behaviors of the crazies run
a wide gamut, from the loathsome to the innocent. The film opens, for
example, with an infected father murdering his wife and then chasing his
children before setting his house on fire. In this vein, one of the more dis-
turbing scenes occurs later in the film as another father becomes infected
and then forces himself upon his daughter before being pulled away. This
act of incest and perhaps the disease as well push both father and daughter
over the edge. The father commits suicide immediately afterward, and the
daughter is later seen wandering through a field, surrounded by soldiers
in matching white hazmat suits who attempt to capture her. As they sur-
round the deranged girl, she approaches them, softly muttering; the image
resembles Bernie Boston’s iconic 1967 photo of protesters putting flowers
into the barrels of the guns held on them by National Guard troops. In
the end, however, the girl is gunned down brutally, and her compatriots,
who had been watching from afar, make their escape.
While Romero’s attention here is still very much on the body, it is clear
that the body functions in a different, though no less political, way. In The
Crazies and the other films considered in this chapter, Romero focuses on
the body as a site of struggle between our deeper urges and motives and
those cultural constraints that make us “civilized” people. Consistently,
Romero’s attention is on the artificial cultural conditions that craft our
humanity, but instead of using the body as an external threat in these
films, Romero recognizes that there is an equally important struggle
occurring on the inside. In The Crazies, for example, the various acts of
insanity we witness on-screen seem to be manifestations of deeply held,
though forbidden, desires. The father’s incestuous lust for his daughter or
the earlier father’s murderous rage against his family are two of the darker
examples, but the film generally portrays the crazies as less dangerous
and more innocent in their unbridled desires.
For the most part, the crazies themselves resemble a kind of “free
love” hippie movement with erratic and unpredictable individual and
collective acts. In one scene, for example, as the infected townspeople
fight back and begin chasing a group of soldiers across a field, others of
the infected are seen following and sweeping the grass with brooms. The
chaotic scene in the town’s high school, the primary quarantine center,
also demonstrates the frenetic, though not exactly threatening, madness

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 The Body as Site of Struggle

of the infected crazies, who are seen jostling, dancing, and babbling en
masse within the building. In these sequences, Romero seems to once
again be borrowing from the larger cultural context to instill the film
with relevance beyond the immediate plot. The strong-arm tactics of both
Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Chicago police during the 1968 Demo-
cratic National Convention and perhaps more poignantly the tragic 1970
shooting of protesters by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State loom
in the background of the various scenes in which soldiers clash with the
infected townspeople.
There is an ambivalence in The Crazies, however, which provides
insight into Romero’s deeper political stance. The Crazies could be said
to have two protagonists. One the one hand, there is the military leader,
Colonel Peckem, who is brought in to deal with the unfolding crisis and
who is responsible for securing the quarantine zone. It is telling that
in this film, he is not portrayed as some kind of monster—the notion
of military leader as monster wouldn’t take hold in Romero’s pictures
until the 1985 Day of the Dead—but instead, Colonel Peckem is seen as a
hard-working man whose primary goal is to fulfill his mission and move
on. The other protagonist, who has more screen time and whose effort
to escape becomes the driving force of the plot, is David, a fireman and
former Green Beret whose tour in Vietnam and medals have made him a
town hero. David is one of the firemen who responds to the film’s open-
ing house fire, and when his girlfriend, Judy, learns of the possible virus
threat and impending quarantine—she is a nurse for the local doctor’s
office where the military establishes its headquarters—it is David who
leads the small group of evaders.
As a protagonist, David is deeply ambivalent. He is a trained and deco-
rated war hero but is also reluctant to engage in violence. When the fugi-
tives encounter a group of soldiers, it is his friend Clank who kills them,
although his escalating violence suggests that he is infected and beginning
to lose control of his faculties. After Clank kills the five soldiers, he starts
a long rant about the fact that David was a Green Beret while Clank was
only “regular army.” Ultimately, it is Clank and not David who commits
an act of heroism, allowing Judy and David to escape capture, although
it has also become clear that Clank is infected with the virus so that his
acts of heroism are actually manifestations of his forbidden desire to be
seen as heroic.
David also features in one of the film’s two final scenes. We learn that
the key to fighting the spreading infection is to find a person who has
natural immunity. Throughout the film’s second half, each of David’s

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

companions succumbs to insanity, but David does not. It becomes evi-

dent by the film’s denouement that David is this immune person. As he is
finally taken into custody, after seeing Judy killed in the crossfire between
soldiers and the infected, David says nothing about his immunity, and
when one of the guards asks a technician whether the vacant-eyed David
should be tested, the technician replies: “Are you kidding, soldier?” David’s
silence at the film’s ending makes narrative sense—he has just witnessed
his pregnant girlfriend killed by soldiers and has spent the majority of
the film evading military personnel. But it also makes sense in terms of
Romero’s broader inquiry into the constrained and unconstrained body.
By the film’s end, David has witnessed the madness of both the uncon-
strained body in the form of the crazies and of the violent constraints
used by the military to contain and control these bodies. In the end, it
is not so much that David chooses to champion the crazies as that he
refuses to continue to serve the mechanisms of their constraint. In this
way, his silence is a refusal of the cultural order more than an embrace
of the disorder wrought by the crazies.
The film’s other final moment also gestures toward this ambivalent
relationship between the unconstrained and the constraints employed
to subdue them. As the chief research scientist, Dr. Watts, makes a major
breakthrough in his work on the disease, he gathers the crucial test tubes
and hurriedly makes his way back through the quarantine zone. Unex-
pectedly, he is mistaken for one of the infected and is herded by sol-
diers into the area filled with the quarantined crazies. As the mob grows
unruly, the infected charge the soldiers, breaking the cordon and running
headlong down a flight of stairs. In the ensuing crush, the test tubes are
smashed, and the doctor is pushed down the stairs to his apparent death.
The doctor’s death and the loss of a cure for the Trixie virus is ironic, not
only in that he is killed by the infected people he sought to cure but also
in that his death at their unwitting hands was caused by the soldiers who
mistook him for one of the infected.
In the film’s final moments, we see the other protagonist, Colonel
Peckem, being decontaminated and then lifted into a hovering helicopter
as he is called away to deal with another outbreak of the Trixie virus. It
is clear that the battle between the unconstrained bodies of the crazies
and the equally unpleasant military efforts will be ongoing, and this open
ending suggests that in his ambivalence toward the madness of the Trixie
virus, Romero recognizes the ongoing and irresolvable tension between
the desires and motives that lurk inside our bodies and the efforts of
culture and society to restrain them.

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 The Body as Site of Struggle

The body as the explicit site of struggle becomes clearer in a trio of

films that span what might be thought of as the second half of Romero’s
career as a filmmaker (at least to this point): the 1988 film Monkey Shines,
the 1993 film The Dark Half, and 2000’s Bruiser. In these three films,
Romero most explicitly employs the body as a site of struggle, and it is
ultimately these bodily urges that the protagonists must resist. That said,
as much as these films form a trilogy around the temptations of the body
and the primal instincts against which culture is set, they also demon-
strate alternate points of view with regard to this fundamental contest
between desire and decorum.
Monkey Shines, adapted by Romero from the novel by Michael Stewart,
follows the story of Allan, a young law student who also participates in
track and whom we first meet as he rises to stretch for his morning run.
In these opening sequences, Romero’s camera pays particular attention
to his sculpted physique, and the reason for this attention is made clear
a few moments later when he is struck by a truck while he is out jogging.
The surgeon, Dr. Wiseman, determines that the accident has resulted in
paralysis, and after a brief surgery Allan is released from the hospital, par-
alyzed from the neck down. Allan chafes against his new, helpless status
as a quadriplegic, but his friend Geoffrey arrives with a solution, a trained
monkey named Ella. Ella and Allan quickly bond, but the audience knows
that there is more to Ella than meets the eye. Ella, we have learned, was
an experimental subject who had been injected with a serum containing
human brain cells, and it is Geoffrey’s hope that she will exhibit acceler-
ated learning when paired with Allan. The undisclosed experiment goes
well. Soon Allan is back in law school, engaged in a new relationship with
the monkey’s trainer, a woman named Melanie, and developing a closer
relationship with the remarkably intelligent Ella. As the film unfolds, we
learn that Ella and Allan have established a kind of psychic bond, with
the monkey enacting various acts of revenge and murder for her master.
The plot is finally resolved when Allan is forced to confront and kill his
murderous helper. As a coda to the film’s climax, Allan’s spinal injury
is fixed through surgery, and he moves into a new future with Melanie.
The deep psychic connection between Allan and Ella is clearly more
than the affectionate bond of human and animal, and it soon becomes
apparent that Ella is functioning not only in response to Allan’s explicit
commands but also based on his deep-seated impulses. These repressed
thoughts are most often expressed in terms of rage and anger, and the
first real sign of this bond comes after a dispute between Allan and his
live-in nurse, Maryanne. Maryanne shows her resentment toward the

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

new monkey helper from the beginning, but the real source of grievance
comes from Maryanne’s pet bird, Bogey. After an argument between
Maryanne and Allan, the bird lands on Allan’s face and begins pecking at
him as he lies helpless. Moments later, we assume the point of view of Ella
as she escapes her cage and seeks out the bird, which is later discovered
dead and stuffed into the nurse’s slipper. Not only do we see Ella carry-
ing out Allan’s unspoken desire for revenge, but Allan’s dialogue reveals
a growing connection between man and monkey. Arguing with his nurse
in the moments preceding Ella’s attack on the bird, Allan becomes easily
enraged and shouts, “This is our house. You have been hired to perform
certain functions in it, and when you don’t perform those functions,
we get pissed off!” “Just who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” the nurse
asks, and Allan responds, “Me and Ella.” “It’s unnatural, you and that
monkey. She is just a dirty, filthy, sneaky little beast,” Maryanne hisses
as she leaves the room. After the death of her bird, Maryanne quits, and
as she leaves, she shouts at Allan, “You killed my Bogey . . . not with his
hands, he had his little demon do it for him!” What is remarkable in these
scenes is not only the noticeable connection between Allan and Ella but
also the growing, savage anger in Allan. “It deserved to die,” Allan says
to the nurse. “It fucking deserved to die.”
This increasing connection becomes even more apparent the second
time we share Ella’s point of view and become aware that Allan is also see-
ing through Ella’s eyes, as if in a dream. As Ella runs through the woods
outside Allan’s house, we see through Allan’s eyes as he sees through Ella’s
eyes, and the melding of animal and human becomes more evident. Allan
soon becomes convinced both that Ella has learned to escape her cage and
the house and that the two have developed a kind of “mind meld.” The sin-
ister nature of this connection becomes clearer after Allan learns that his
paralysis might not have been the result of the accident with the truck but
instead may have been a congenital abnormality that the attending surgeon
failed to notice. This combined with the fact that Dr. Wiseman has taken
up with Allan’s ex-girlfriend leads Allan into a terrible rage. During this
sequence, we begin to notice that Allan’s teeth have changed; he has devel-
oped sharp and protruding canines, much like Ella’s. As Allan bites down
on his lip, drawing blood, Ella comes up into his lap and kisses away the
blood. Allan’s rage is transferred to Ella, as we next see through her point
of view as she travels to the cabin where the doctor and Allan’s deceitful
ex-lover lie together. Matches are struck, and we later learn that both were
consumed in a fire. When Allan’s mother learns of this tragedy, she comes
to inform him, but through the psychic connection, he already knows.

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 The Body as Site of Struggle

The blurring of line between Allan’s unconscious mind and Ella’s physi-
cal body is evident here on three levels. At the narrative level, Ella’s actions
are driven by Allan’s unconscious impulses, and these actions propel the
plot toward its eventual resolution. At a cinematic level, it is interesting
the way that Romero utilizes the point-of-view shot to implicate us in the
connection between Allan and Ella. Thus, it is not only Allan who sees
through the eyes of his surrogate—and unconstrained—body but also
the audience, who, having experienced the wrongs visited upon Allan,
also sees through the eyes of the body that seeks violent redress of these
wrongs. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, at the bodily level, as the
bond between Ella and Allan grows, it is Allan’s body, manifested in his
changing teeth, that begins to transform, taking on the characteristics
of the simian body that now acts on its behalf.

Allan and his monkey helper Ella develop an unusually close relationship
in Romero’s Monkey Shines. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).
The implications of the bond between Ella and Allan become explicit
as Allan discusses his fears with Geoffrey and Melanie: “I’ve had the most
horrible thoughts lately. It’s like vomiting up every resentment I’ve ever
had, every ugly, vicious sinful . . . that’s what it is, it’s sin, it’s the desire
to sin . . . Ella’s plugged into that.” Here we might be led to imagine that
it is Ella’s animal instincts that are overwhelming Allan, and indeed, the
sequences in which Allan’s teeth resemble those of his simian helper add

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

credence to this. But a more consistent view is that it is Allan’s animalistic

instincts—those base desires for revenge—that are being projected into
Ella. There is, for instance, no reason that Ella would desire revenge on
Allan’s former lover or his incompetent surgeon; rather, it is Allan’s rage
that is exaggerated by his connection to Ella, and these basic emotions
of rage and anger become funneled into Ella, who becomes the vessel
for his intentions. Thought of in this way, Ella becomes the ideal uncon-
strained body for Allan, whose body is doubly constrained. Ella is both
free to move physically and stealthily—the original meaning of the phrase
“monkey shines” is in fact to do mischief in a sly and covert way—and
unconstrained by human cultural notions of civility or mercy. In this
way, the connection between Allan and Ella offers two dangers. First, it
allows Allan a lethal outlet for his every frustration and angry thought,
and second, the more Allan allows these dangerous, instinctive feelings to
the surface, the more his human veneer wears away—hence the physical
transformation demonstrated by his changing teeth.
Importantly, in Monkey Shines it is the physical body of Ella that serves
as the catalyst for both the unleashing of Allan’s dark emotions and their
manifestations. Recognizing the potential danger, Geoffrey and Allan
decide it best that Ella be taken away, and during the period in which Allan
is separated from his simian helper, his rages diminish. He begins a more
physical, romantic relationship with his new girlfriend and attempts to
reconcile the strained relationship with his mother. It is only after Ella
has escaped and returns to Allan’s home that the repressed emotions
begin to resurface. Allan warns his mother as he recognizes the emotional
turmoil created by Ella’s proximity: “Mother, she’s here. Ella’s here, she’s
in the house . . . she’s here, I can feel her, filling me up, filling me with
. . . these rages, Ella pulls them out of me, she pulls them to the surface.”
Allan’s mother dismisses his fears as some bizarre act, but later, as she
takes a bath, she is electrocuted by Ella with a plugged-in hair dryer.
Geoffrey arrives shortly thereafter, having now learned how powerful his
brain serum has been on Ella, and in a brief conversation Allan reveals
the deeper truth of his relationship to Ella: “It’s me. I killed them, all of
them. . . . I’ve got five thousand years of civilized behavior bred into me.
What if I wasn’t civilized anymore; what if I was an animal free to follow
my instincts? That’s what the devil is, Geoff, it’s instinct, animal instinct.”
Eventually, Allan must face the unconstrained body that has elicited
and manifested his deeply repressed feelings. After Ella kills Geoffrey and
Melanie, the new girlfriend, is knocked unconscious, Allan is left alone.
Deprived of any physical means of defense, Allan overcomes Ella through

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seduction. After convincing the monkey that they will be together, Allan
draws Ella up to give him a hug around the neck, at which point he vio-
lently sinks his teeth into her neck and, flinging her from side to side, kills
the animal. In the end, Allan overcomes the manifestation of his inner
feelings through cunning, through the ruse of surrendering to his inner
desires before violently suppressing them.
The death of Ella is followed by a shot of Allan’s new surgery, designed
to heal his paralysis, and as the surgeon begins cutting down his spine,
the wound opens suddenly as a gore-covered Ella pops up from Allan’s
back. This is only a dream sequence, however, and Allan recovers from
surgery to be driven away by Melanie and begin a new life, but this clos-
ing dream-scare is suggestive of the degree to which the murderous rages
and desire for revenge were centered not in the animal body of Ella but
in the animal body of Allan, the human body that has been conditioned
by those five thousand years of civilization to suppress and constrain the
murderous rages that continue to boil beneath the surface.
The bodily manifestation of our baser instincts also drives the plot of
Romero’s 1993 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Dark Half. On the
surface, the narrative conceit mirrors that of Monkey Shines, in which some
biological “other” serves as the darker alter ego of the protagonist. We learn
in the opening sequences of the film that a young Thad Beaumont suffers
from excruciating headaches that appeared about the same time as his
interest in creative writing. Brain surgery reveals the unabsorbed body of
a twin. We are told that the body of an undeveloped twin may be absorbed
into the body of its stronger sibling, but in Thad’s case, the other twin was
not entirely absorbed and had begun developing, thus creating the cranial
pressure in young Thad. The surgery is successful, and we flash forward to
Thad as a successful writer and college professor. Thad’s apparent respect-
ability, however, is challenged by a blackmailer who has learned that Thad
is also writing under a pseudonym. His alter ego, George Stark, writes
down-and-dirty crime novels with a sinister and relentless protagonist
named Alexis Machine. As a cover story, Thad has crafted George Stark
as a dangerous character with a sordid past, and the blackmailer threatens
to reveal the truth, thus discrediting both Beaumont and Stark.
In order to outsmart the blackmailer, Beaumont and his publishers
arrange to reveal the secret themselves and even set up a mock funeral
for the pen name. A fake tombstone is set up on the gravesite Beaumont’s
father had purchased for him years ago, and with the news out, the threat
seems to be averted. Soon, however, the supernatural takes hold, and
something emerges from the Beaumont plot. We learn that the alter ego

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

takes on a physical form and begins a sadistic and murderous rampage in

an effort to force Beaumont to continue writing his stories, which provide
Stark with some semblance of life. Wrapped around this conceit are two
additional elements, one supernatural and one biological. The supernatu-
ral is embodied by the reappearance of huge flocks of sparrows circling
around the house where Beaumont encounters his alter ego. We are later
informed by one of Beaumont’s colleagues that these are messengers from
the “other side” and may be here to carry one of the souls—Beaumont’s or
Stark’s—back to the land of the dead. The second element is the burial plot,
which we learn contains the remains of that unabsorbed twin removed
from Beaumont’s skull, suggesting that this alter ego has emerged as a
biological double out of the remains of the other twin.
While the film has clear supernatural elements that are holdovers from
King’s source novel, there is also a way of reading the film as Beaumont’s
struggle with his own “darker half.” Thus, as with Monkey Shines, The
Dark Half is a meditation on Beaumont’s own struggles with his inner
and baser instincts, and, as with Romero’s other films, it is notable that
these instincts manifest in physical form. Indeed, one of the motifs of the
film is that as Stark continues to operate independently, his body decays
so that by the film’s climax—in which Stark attempts to force Beaumont
to write another crime novel—the alter ego is literally decaying before our
eyes. That Stark is a biological manifestation of Beaumont’s inner desires
is foreshadowed early in the film as we see the adult Beaumont lecturing
a class full of attentive college students. “We are human beings, plural.
Each one of us is two separate beings. There’s the outer being, the one that
we show to the world at large . . . then there’s the inner being: the truthful
one, passionate, uninhibited, even lustful. Now, most of us keep that inner
being hidden away, locked up. A fiction writer doesn’t have to do that; he
doesn’t have to hide it; he doesn’t have to keep it from anything. He can
let it out . . .” This theme is reinforced when Beaumont’s wife urges him to
stop writing the Stark novels: “You really don’t realize what you’re like when
you write those books, do you? It’s like watching Jekyll turn into Hyde.”
By the film’s climax, Stark forces a confrontation with his other half
by kidnapping Beaumont’s wife and twin babies. Stark seeks to force
the writer to craft another Stark story and thereby allow the alter ego to
live. Their confrontation eventually, though not entirely explicably, turns
physical, during which the enormous flock of circling sparrows burst into
the Beaumont cabin and tear the intruding Stark to pieces before carrying
his skeleton away. While the film is clearly influenced, perhaps overly so,
by King’s obsession with doppelgängers and with the creative process of

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 The Body as Site of Struggle

the writer, the struggle between the civilized veneer of Beaumont and the
brutal savagery of Stark is played out in a decidedly graphic and bodily
way that clearly bears Romero’s mark.

Author Thad Beaumont’s

pseudonym, George Stark,
begins to deteriorate
in Romero’s The Dark
Half. Courtesy of British Film
Institute (BFI).

If the first two films of Romero’s body-as-site-of-contest trilogy suggest

the dangers posed by our manifested “dark half,” then the third in the tril-
ogy undercuts this message by crafting its unconstrained body in a more
positive mode. Bruiser, a low-budget independent film released in 2000,
tells the story of young executive Henry Creedlow, who we quickly learn
is so committed to avoiding confrontation that he has allowed himself
to become an invisible doormat to almost all around him. His wife has
a flagrant affair with Henry’s boss, a loud-mouthed magazine owner; his
best friend is embezzling funds from Henry’s investments; his cleaning
lady is stealing money from his wallet; and even his dog bullies him. In
the midst of this almost comical set of circumstances, Henry awakens
one morning to find that he has no face. The visual conceit is drawn from
a mask-maker’s mold we see earlier in the film, but the reality within the
film is that Henry’s physical features have been replaced with a very real
and fleshy white, blank, and expressionless mask. That this is a fleshly
manifestation is made apparent when Henry cuts himself trying to remove
the mask and finds that the white flesh also bleeds.

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

In the midst of dealing with his sudden Kafkaesque situation, Henry

witnesses his cleaning lady in the act of stealing more items from his
home and in a fit of rage murders her. This initial violence leads Henry
into a sustained string of violent acts in which he exacts revenge on his
cheating wife, his swindling best friend, and his abusive and philander-
ing boss. This final act of vengeance is his most complex and involves
infiltrating a large masquerade party and tricking his boss into being
hung from cables above the loud and boisterous party—complete with
live performance by the band The Misfits—before having his head blown
off by a special effects laser.
Interestingly, as this ultimate retaliation is completed, his real face
returns, and with his features intact, Henry flees the party as the investi-
gating police close in. The film ends with a coda in which we see a trans-
formed Henry—in tie-dyed T-shirt and with long hair—working happily
on an office mail cart. However, as he passes a business meeting in which
a loud and abusive boss is haranguing his employees, Henry stops and
stares. The blustering boss screams at Henry as he walks away—“I’m not
done with you, asshole, get back here!”—at which point Henry turns to
reveal the former blank, white face as the film abruptly ends. It is note-
worthy that Henry’s blank face does not actually equate to any real sense
of invisibility or stealth. He can be seen by others and leaves fingerprints
and other evidence at the crime scenes so that his blank visage actually
does little to facilitate his crimes. What is clear is that Henry’s blank face
releases something murderous within him.
The film’s equation of facelessness with monstrosity, of course, has
numerous precursors, ranging from The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Eyes
without a Face (1960), and Darkman (1990), but what makes Bruiser of
interest here is its equation of the monstrous with the heroic, or at least
the masculine heroic. It is noteworthy that throughout this pseudo-trilogy
of films, Romero has attended primarily to white male protagonists—
something he has generally not done in the Living Dead series—and in
that way seems to be inquiring into the status of the white male. In these
films, privilege and power are wrapped up not only in the physical white
male body but in the ability of that body to contain its darker impulses.
Allan’s loss of physical mobility in Monkey Shines results in his inability
to control Ella, but by overcoming Ella he is able to reclaim his mobility.
In The Dark Half, Thad Beaumont’s affluence is underwritten, literally,
by the financial success of his dark half, but to keep his happy life, Beau-
mont must defeat his alter ego. For Henry Creedlow, the problem, at least
initially, is the opposite. Henry is unable to embrace his own power and

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 The Body as Site of Struggle

privilege and is an almost comic exaggeration of the doormat—when his

wife confronts him about his unwillingness to stand up for himself, even
to her, he responds: “I try my best, you know. . . . There are rules.” The
change in his appearance, however, releases within Henry a murderous
version of his white male privilege, and it cannot be ignored that his first
victims are a woman of color and his wife.
In this regard, it might be easy to equate Romero’s Bruiser with the
numerous elegies to failing white male privilege—like Joel Schumacher’s
1993 Falling Down or Sam Mendes’s 2000 American Beauty—but in other
ways, that equation is undermined. While Henry does release his rage
in stereotypical ways at those whom contemporary patriarchal society
would deem his natural victims—his servant and his wife—there are
at least two complications within Romero’s film. First, there is a cost to
Henry’s new power, the loss of a potential relationship with the woman
we are led to believe would be his true soul mate, the estranged wife of
his former boss, Milo. As the newly faceless Henry confronts her and
urges her to divorce Milo, she objects, “I am trying. It is not that simple.”
Henry replies, “In your head it’s not, but out here where your feet touch the
ground it is.” Any chance of a future is ended as she responds to Henry’s
murder spree, “I can understand what you did. But I can’t forgive it, and
I can’t forget it.” It is also notable on this front that Henry’s ultimate vic-
tim—the one whose death he spends much of the film preparing for and
which is the most graphic and theatrical—is his boss, Milo, a loathsome
caricature of masculine pride. From our first viewing of Milo, he is every
stereotype of white male privilege imaginable—abusive to employees,
quick with lewd sexual innuendos and philandering. Even in his death,
he screams at Henry, “You’re nothing but an ant,” before being killed to
the cheers of the unsuspecting crowd below.
One of the triggers that begins the process of transforming Henry is
a radio story he hears and comments on at several points in the film in
which a frustrated caller commits suicide on the air. The degree to which
this affects Henry is notable, and it can be read as his realization that
the repressed rage and frustration building within him will have lethal
consequences one way or another. In the end, the decision is almost made
for Henry as his faceless condition allows him to vent this rage without
turning it upon himself. In this way, the cycle of sacrifice so evident in
both Monkey Shines and The Dark Half becomes clear—either Henry will
kill himself or vanquish the unconstrained, libidinous Milo.
The return of Henry’s real face after Milo’s death is also instructive
because it suggests that Milo has functioned as Henry’s doppelgänger. In

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

Monkey Shines, it was Ella who served as Allan’s other, and in The Dark
Half, Stark mirrored Beaumont; in both cases, it is the death of the other
that restores the protagonist to full strength and vitality. In Bruiser, it is
the death of Milo that restores Henry’s face and his sense of identity, thus
suggesting that the odious boss was the boisterous and chauvinistic other
to Henry’s timid and mild-mannered hero. In this sense, it is Milo who
has operated as an unconstrained body throughout much of the film’s
narrative—and, indeed, we observe him engaging in abusive behaviors
with his employees as well as in a public sexual act with Henry’s wife in
the midst of a crowded party. By contrast, Henry’s body has been overly
constrained. The degree to which Henry has repressed his own anger and
indignation is made clear in several instances early in the film when the
narrative shifts unexpectedly into fantasies of rage and revenge. In one
of the opening scenes of the film, we witness Henry drag a rude woman
down to the ground before forcing her head underneath an oncoming
railroad train, only to find that this was Henry’s fantasy.
The ambivalence of the ending is also a hallmark of Romero’s film-
making and bears on the question of his orientation toward these ques-
tions of male privilege within the film. On the one hand, Henry escapes
punishment for murdering four people—his maid, wife, best friend, and
boss—thus suggesting that his male agency has been returned through
acts of violence against others. On the other hand, at film’s end we see
Henry has relinquished his “yuppie” status. In the early scenes of the film,
we learn that Henry is desperate to climb the corporate ladder and has
even purchased an enormous house he is unable to afford. By the final
scenes, Henry is happily employed as a mail delivery worker in another
anonymous office space. There is also a sense, especially in his willing-
ness to confront one of his new bosses as he harangues other employees,
that Henry has seen through the hierarchical veneer of modern capital-
ism and is refusing to return to the role of obedient worker. In the film’s
final flash, the newly faceless Henry turns and says, “Coming, sir,” with
both calm and menace. Where this new sense of power and agency might
lead is uncertain, and the film ends, in classic Romero fashion, with more
uncertainty than closure.
Across the three films of this “minor” trilogy, Romero utilizes the body
as a central site for the contest between cultural norms and instinctive,
primordial desires. The struggles between desire and culture occur most
noticeably and directly within the corporeal space of the body—or in the
conflict between the protagonist and the manifested body of his double—
and in each film, these struggles mark the body. In the case of Bruiser,

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 The Body as Site of Struggle

the struggle between Henry’s mild-mannered passivity and his inner rage
removes his identity by replacing his face with the blank, white mask, and
in both Monkey Shines and The Dark Half, the manifestation of the dop-
pelgänger involves direct physical consequences. As The Dark Half pro-
gresses, we observe the physical body of George Stark, Beaumont’s double,
dramatically deteriorating, and when during their confrontation Stark
begins to take up the pencil and write in his own voice, his wounds begin
to heal and it is Beaumont who begins to deteriorate. In the earliest of these
films, Monkey Shines, the doppelgänger is the nonhuman (though chemi-
cally altered by human brain cells) Ella. Here the transformation occurs
in those moments of rage in which Allan’s teeth take on animal qualities.
In each instance, deeply hidden and repressed desires manifest physically.
The manifestation of these inner urges, however, is treated differently
across the three films. In the first two pictures, the manifestation of
desire is viewed as a threat. For Thad Beaumont, the appearance of a real,
physical George Stark is a threat to all he loves and holds dear, especially
his family. Indeed, one of the things that diminishes the impact of The
Dark Half is the relatively singular view we have of Stark, who appears
only as a monstrous sociopath. Another mark against this film is in its
resolution. In the end, Beaumont does not vanquish Stark, but rather the
monstrous other is defeated by a sudden and largely unexplained super-
natural intervention by the flock of sparrows that pick apart his bones.
Ella, the physical manifestation in Monkey Shines, while still a dan-
gerous and threatening entity within the film, is treated with a greater
degree of sympathy. Indeed, it is possible to view Ella as nothing but the
physical agent of Allan’s desires, and in this way, Allan’s murder of the
small primate is not so much overcoming Ella as overcoming his own
inner rage. Read in this fashion, it is also notable that in Monkey Shines, it
is Allan alone who defeats the instrument of his rage through the ironic
final moment in which he savagely bites and kills the monkey. But, as with
The Dark Half, the end of Monkey Shines suggests that the vanquishing
of this murderous other restores normalcy. In Allan’s case, this comes in
both his physical restoration, which we see beginning after his corrective
surgery, and in his romantic union with Melanie. In Beaumont’s case, it is
the restoration of his safe domestic life as well as, implicitly, the restora-
tion of his literary integrity, as he can now relinquish the profitable Stark
novels in favor of pursuing his own literary inclinations.
Bruiser has a more complicated ending. Henry Creedlow is confronted
not so much with the manifestation of his inner desires as with his inability
to articulate his self in relation to those desires. The blank face that Creedlow

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

assumes is a manifestation of his own non-being, at least non-being as

an agent in the world. The reclamation of his face and identity is accom-
plished precisely through the manifestation of his murderous desires in
the real world—at least through the final act of killing his boss, who, in a
way, functions as his other. Henry thus confronts not the manifestation
of his desires but his own passive inability to manifest them himself.
The ending of Bruiser also helps to raise an issue that has been implicit
in much of the preceding discussion, namely that all three protagonists are
white, middle-class men. This is not surprising in relation to mainstream
Hollywood but is at odds with much of Romero’s more well-known work.
Given Romero’s previous inclination to feature females and people of color
as protagonists, it seems plausible to suggest that the trilogy of films con-
sidered here make something of a statement about the position of the white
male in contemporary society, and read in this way, the films do resonate
with the conflicted and often embattled position of the white male in a
society in which he is both remarkably privileged but also led, rightly, to
recognize the consequences of his privilege. While both Monkey Shines
and The Dark Half resonate with this reading, it is Bruiser that seems to
most directly engage the nature of white male privilege. Henry’s white
mask-face seems to provide him with a level of invisibility and protects
him from the consequences of his crimes mirroring the broader confines
of white privilege.1 Contemporary cultural privileges mean that whites are
rarely asked to acknowledge their “race,” just as masculinity is assumed
as the norm of “proper” behavior. In one way, Bruiser might be read as
a vindication of the privileged white male as embattled hero needing to
strike back at the oppression he feels from those questioning his privilege.
However, the ending of Bruiser suggests a potentially different read-
ing. The Henry we see at the film’s conclusion is not the epitome of the
corporate-climbing man of business he aspired to be at the film’s begin-
ning; instead, at least judging by his appearance, he has dropped out of
the corporate rat race. In this way, it is possible to see Henry’s transfor-
mation as not simply stripping away his passivity but as stripping away
the artificial layers of contemporary life—white privilege, masculinity,
capitalism. The reappearance of Henry’s blank, white face at the film’s
ending, it is worth recalling, is provoked by the verbal display of the blus-
tering white male boss who mirrors the corporate structure Henry has
ostensibly rejected. Read in this way, Bruiser adds another dimension to
the theme developed in both Monkey Shines and The Dark Half: layers of
artificial privilege and constraint stand at odds with the desires, drives,
and motives lying beneath the surface.

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 3
Romero’s Mythic Bodies: Martin and Knightriders

The ongoing struggle between desire and decorum that permeates George
Romero’s films is consistently located in and depicted through his use of
the human body. In his Living Dead films, it is the unconstrained bodies
of the living dead that provide the critical leverage with which Romero
pries out certain cultural tendencies for inspection and, generally, con-
demnation. In the loose trilogy of films considered in the previous chapter,
the body is precisely the site at which these struggles between repressed
desires and social restrictions occur. The final two films I attend to at
length represent a more macroscopic perspective for Romero, dialecti-
cally contrasting meditations on the primal forces of the human condi-
tion, life and death. Romero’s engagement with the most fundamental
poles of human existence comes through adaptations of broader, mythic
narratives. In Martin, Romero reinterprets the vampire myth and with
it the wider cultural notions of death and chaos that are endemic in it,
and in Knightriders, Romero revisits the King Arthur myth and with it
the deep and consistent cultural notion that the life of the kingdom, or
community, is wrapped up in the body of its sovereign. In these two films,
then, Romero reflects on the mythic foundations of life and death and
chaos and order. Fittingly, the body lies at the heart of both these myths.1
Martin follows the exploits of a young man named Martin who may or
may not be a vampire. We observe him kill, and his murders focus on a
fascination with blood and even the drinking of blood; further, there is a
clear connection between the release of blood and Martin’s sexuality and
sexual desires, all typical of the vampire mythos. After an opening murder
sequence that takes place on a train heading toward Pittsburgh, Martin

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

meets up with an older relative with whom the young man has come to live.
But theirs is a strange and tense relationship, and we soon find that the older
man, Tada Cuda, believes Martin is a vampire. Tada Cuda repeatedly calls
Martin a “nosferatu” and speaks of a family curse that afflicts his nephew.
The remainder of the film details Martin’s struggle with his own murder-
ous impulses and with Tada Cuda’s designs to cure him of his vampirism.
Two elements of Martin stand out in relation to the broader reading
of this chapter. First and perhaps most striking is the degree to which
Martin’s own actions are grounded in the clumsy and imprecise world of
the physical. Martin’s murders are more like those of a slightly awkward
serial killer than of a hypnotic and supernaturally powered vampire. He
uses a syringe to inject his victims with some kind of tranquilizing poison,
and then after they have succumbed to the drug, he uses a razor blade to
cut their flesh and drink their blood. After this, he consummates the act
through sexual activity with his victim. The murders shown on-screen
are protracted affairs that involve extended struggles and grappling. In
one particularly spectacular example, Martin enters into the home of
a woman he has seen earlier. With her husband away on business, he
anticipates finding her alone but is surprised to discover her lover visiting.
What unfolds is an extended game of cat and mouse in which Martin
first injects the male lover before running away to hide somewhere in the
house. As the illicit lovers quarrel over whether they can call the police
about the intruder—the affair is, after all, a secret—Martin waits for the
male to succumb to the poison before returning to poison the woman.
The sequence lasts for more than ten minutes and is filled with the kind
of awkwardness that marks the entire film—the lovers arguing, Martin’s
desperate attempts to stop the woman from calling the police, and so on.
In this way, Romero undermines the mythic nature of the vampire by
portraying his vampire as lanky, boyish, and uncoordinated.
Second is the explicit discussion of magic and myth within the film.
On numerous occasions, Martin rejects the idea that he is some kind
of supernatural creature. “There isn’t any magic, it’s just a sickness,” he
exclaims to Tada Cuda at one point; later he says, “You see, it isn’t magic,
even I know that.” The degree to which Romero is poking fun at the cin-
ematic myth of the vampire is revealed in a sequence during which Tada
Cuda returns home at night and finds himself in a deserted playground
as a heavy fog rolls in. Martin soon appears with white face, long fangs,
and a black cloak. As the old man stumbles to the ground, holding his
rosary and crucifix in trembling hands, Martin begins to laugh. “It’s only
a costume,” the young man explains.

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 Romero’s Mythic Bodies

However, Romero’s engagement with the relationship between myth

and bodily reality is not quite as simple as derision toward the first and
an embrace of the second. Martin’s refusal of “magic” is complicated and
in many ways undermined by the film itself. Most notable are the numer-
ous fantasy sequences within the film. During the murder scenes and in
several other places, the film shifts to black and white sequences that seem
to be from another time, and in these sequences the classic mythological
trappings of the vampire story are evident. The women Martin pursues
are seen beckoning to him as if already ensnared by his seductive pow-
ers. Representative of these sequences is the moment when Martin first
enters the house in which he later finds the illicit lovers. The scene shifts
back and forth from his entrance into the modern home—in color—to a
fantasy sequence in which the woman, dressed in a long, billowing white
gown and carrying a candelabra, beckons him to follow her up the stairs.
As he climbs the stairs in the modern home, it becomes a grand circular
staircase in what appears to be a nineteenth-century mansion. As he
pursues the woman in the parallel black and white sequence, she calls out
to him, “Martin, Martin,” and glances back for him to follow. Approach-
ing the bedroom door, he imagines the woman lying down to accept his
embrace, but when he opens the modern/real door, he is shocked to find
her with her male lover. “Who are you?” Martin asks the strange male
who has intruded into this real space of his fantasy.
There is never a clear explanation for these black and white sequences,
and we are left to puzzle over whether these are Martin’s homicidal fan-
tasies or echoes of his earlier crimes. While Martin explicitly rejects the
notion of magic and embraces the idea that he has a “sickness,” he does
not reject the notion that he is a vampire. At one point, when questioned
by the daughter of Tada Cuda, he says that he is eighty-four years old—
though it is unclear whether this is meant as a joke or as a statement of
either his true age or real belief about himself. What is clear is that Martin
believes himself to be some kind of vampire. In a series of phone calls he
makes to a local radio talk show, Martin takes pains to dispel the movie
myths about vampires—he does not, he explains, burn up in the sun or
have to return to his coffin: “It’s all crazy.”
While Romero is clearly poking fun at the gothic conventions of the
movie vampire, there is also a way in which he is still engaged in the busi-
ness of interrogating the unconstrained body, and in this way the vampire
is a natural symbol for his work. The vampire has long been associated with
unchecked desires, and at a basic level the very idea of a vampire inverts our
natural sense of the order of the world—a living dead creature that feeds

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

upon the blood of the living. As critic Rosemary Jackson notes regarding
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “His appearance means that chaos is come again,
for he is before good or evil, outside human categorization.”2 Martin is a
radically demythologized figure: an awkward young man struggling with
his own desires and place in the world and a figure very much in keeping
with Romero’s overall body of work, in which uncontrolled appetites com-
bine with a lingering desire for restraint and normalcy. Martin laments
on the radio call-in show about his desire to find someone to have normal
relations with and to not have to fulfill his needs through murderous acts
and in this way becomes, even with all his failings, the quintessential
vampire. As William Patrick Day notes, the vampire has long been “an
ambiguous figure in a story about the nature of humanity at a time when
we are no longer sure we know what human nature is. Does humanity lie
in our ethical nature, our ability to control our desires and needs, or in
the liberation and affirmation of those impulses?”3 It is this struggle that
drives Martin as he wrestles with his place in the world.
At the root of this struggle are the contrasting impulses of life and
death, which Freud saw as the two basic categories of impulse: eros, the
life-preserving and sexual instincts, and thanatos, the destructive and
violent instincts. Yet, these two instincts ought not be seen as utterly
incompatible; rather, it is the tension between the two that creates the
contours of the human condition. Commenting on Freud’s thinking,
Herbert Marcuse notes “the terrible necessity of the inner connection
between civilization and barbarism, progress and suffering, freedom
and unhappiness—a connection which reveals itself ultimately as that
between Eros and Thanatos.” 4 In the vampire, and certainly in Martin,
the tension lies in the conflation of these two—the destructive vampire’s
bite that brings both death and eternal life. The vampire thus can be
seen as that mythic figure that stands at the intersection of these two
great impulses—one toward life and order and preservation and the other
toward death and chaos and destruction.5
The tension between the impulses toward life and death is also evident
in the recurring theme of suicide. Martin’s murders are designed to appear
as suicides; in the initial murder sequence on the train, he takes pains to
spill pills and arrange the room so that it might appear as if his victim took
her own life. The illusion that Martin conjures—that his victims sought
their fate—is twofold: first, in the fantasy sequences in which Martin imag-
ines his victims beckoning him, and second, in the carefully constructed
scenes he creates to imply that they had chosen to die. In a poignantly
ironic moment, it is a real suicide that cuts short Martin’s one attempt at

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a normal life. Seeking a normal relationship, Martin begins an affair with

Mrs. Santini and during this time seems to be bringing his murderous
impulses under control. Late in the film, however, he enters her apartment
to find that she has actually committed suicide—slashing her wrists in the
bathtub. After Martin finds her corpse, he calls the radio show and laments
the misinformation about vampires—especially the myth that they have
“lots of ladies”—and reconciles himself to his life: “You get used to things,
you know . . . you get used to your life and it all gets easier.”
This reconciliation, however, is short-lived. Martin’s use of the illu-
sion of suicide undoes him, and in the film’s final moments, Tada Cuda
approaches a sleeping Martin. Having instructed his nephew that he could
not take anyone from the town, Cuda confronts him: “I warned you, Mar-
tin, nobody in the town. . . . I heard about Mrs. Santini. Do you think I
believe she killed herself, do you really think I believed this? Your soul is
damned, nosferatu.” And with this, the old man drives a stake through
Martin’s heart, and the film ends with a long shot of Martin’s prone and
bloody body and then overhead shots of Cuda’s house with a newly dug plot
of ground that the old man is tending while in the background numerous
callers are heard asking the radio station where the “Count” has gone.
Interestingly, one of the promotional taglines for the film was “A vam-
pire for our age of disbelief,” and the tension between belief and disbelief
plays throughout the film. In this way, the film resonates deeply with
the kinds of cynicism and incredulity that marked the late 1970s with its
challenges to moral, political, and cultural authorities. Martin is decid-
edly unsure of himself, what he wants, and how he ought to deal with his
impulses. There is also a deep ambivalence evident in Martin as the title
character vacillates between embracing his murderous and chaotic desires
and rejecting these inner urges. Both the uncertainty and the ambivalence
underscore Romero’s approach to the broader mythos of the vampire and
the way in which he tailors the myth to his own ends. The mythic vampire
represents chaotic desire unleashed—and in this way is the purest form
of the unconstrained body—but in Romero’s version, these desires are
housed in the awkward body of Martin and his insecurities. Just as the
1970s was a time of deep questioning and dissatisfaction with traditional
answers, so too Martin is a vampire perfectly borne of this era.
The struggle with tradition is, in some ways, the most poignant aspect
in Martin. It is this contest that animates the tension between the “fan-
tasy” black and white sequences and the “real” colorized sequences of
Martin’s crimes and also the tension between Martin and his erstwhile
benefactor, Tada Cuda. But this tension also plays out in other ways.

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Tada Cuda struggles not only with Martin but also with his increasingly
modern daughter—who seeks to create a new, more progressive life for
herself—and with the church. In one telling sequence, Cuda argues with
a new priest who rejects the traditional teachings about evil and the devil;
for the older man, the traditional beliefs are the absolute truth and the
newer liberalized beliefs distortions and heresy. In a way, it would have
been easy for Romero to create the older man as a caricature and to craft
Martin as a clear rejection of Tada Cuda’s old-fashioned point of view,
but the film’s sudden conclusion—in which Cuda kills Martin with the
traditional stake through the heart—suggests that we would be wise not
to simply turn our back on the old ways. The cultural traditions that
define our ways of life also hold in them the prospects of death, here a
death visited physically upon the mysteriously ambivalent body of Martin.
While Martin reveals some of Romero’s uncertainty regarding tradi-
tional belief systems, most of his films portray the old structures of reli-
gious and cultural beliefs in negative ways. Romero’s larger ambivalence
toward traditions is made clearer when his vampire tale is contrasted
with his modern reworking of the Arthurian legend in Knightriders. In
this film from 1981, Romero again takes an anachronistic view of a more
traditional tale—in this instance, recasting the Arthurian legend into
modern times through a traveling troupe of entertainers who joust on
motorcycles—and utilizes this anachronism as a means of reconsidering
one of the founding myths of Western culture, King Arthur. Where the
vampire myth can be thought of as framing our sense of evil, chaos, and
destruction, the Arthurian legend lies at the root of our notions of good-
ness, order, and life. As N. J. Higham has observed, “The idea of Arthur
has been one of the most persistent and powerful in Western culture
over the last millennium, at least, and shows little sign now of abating.”6
Romero’s version of this tale centers around King Billy, the leader of
a strange amalgam of stunt cycle show and renaissance fair, in which
performers joust while riding motorcycles and stage these contests for
crowds of spectators in small towns. The plot is driven by the encroach-
ment of modern life—with its ambitions and glitz—into the seemingly
idyllic life of the carnival performers. Billy, like Tada Cuda in Martin, is
a staunch conservative and rejects almost all the trappings of modern
life, especially the glitz and glamour increasingly pushed upon him by
an adoring public. As the troupe gains prominence, a bevy of promoters
and publicists seek to get a piece of the action, but King Billy is steadfast
in his refusal of these seductions. When a young boy approaches him
after a show to ask for an autograph on a magazine cover featuring Billy,

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the performer refuses: “I’m sorry, I don’t like this kind of stuff.” The slick
magazine cover smacks of commercialism and stunt cycle riders, and for
Billy this is anathema to the ideals of the troupe.

King Billy rejects celebrity status by refusing an autograph request in

Romero’s Knightriders. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).

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 Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

Where in Martin, the struggle is between the bodily desires of its title
character and the moral strictures of traditional religion, in Knightriders
the struggle is between traditional values of community and the lures of
late capitalism. Indeed, the central tension in the film is between Billy’s
idealistic communal variation on the rules of chivalry and the capital-
istic impulse toward wealth and material goods. In this way, Billy, like
Arthur before him, stands as the last vanguard of a way of life against
the onslaught of modern distractions and seductions.
The lure of modern life, however, is more tempting to many of Billy’s
subjects. Billy’s nemesis in the film is Morgan, the Black Knight, who both
portrays the rebellious enemy of the king during the troupe’s jousting
performances and leads a small band of dissenters behind the scenes.
For Morgan, the fame and promise of wealth is the primary motivation
for performing, and the lure of bigger markets and more money draws
him into open opposition to Billy and, eventually, into leading a small
band of the “knights” to split with the troupe and sign contracts with a
television production company. Of course, Morgan is not alone in his
frustration with Billy’s insistence on a strict, almost dogmatic adherence
to tradition. Virtually every other member of the troupe, from the cadre
of knights to the merchants who sell goods during the fair, express a
desire to modernize and a willingness to compromise their principles in
the face of modern pressures.
It is not only the appeal of modern comforts and the prospects of
wealth that tear at the fragile community of the troupe. There is also the
encroachment of external corrupting factors that threaten Billy’s moral
order. As the troupe settles into a new fairground, a pair of deputies come,
insisting that the troupe’s paperwork is not in order. It soon becomes
apparent that they are not there to enforce regulations but in pursuit of
a bribe so that things can go smoothly. Morgan and others are in favor of
paying the bribe and getting on with business, but when King Billy arrives,
he refuses to bend. The confrontation seems resolved as Billy intimidates
the deputies into leaving, but later in the evening they return and arrest a
member of the troupe, Bagman, for possession of marijuana. Billy insists
that he be taken along, and both men are arrested. In his pursuit of the
medieval code, Billy is willing to face unfair punishment, to sacrifice his
body in the name of the code, but the deputies, perhaps recognizing this,
choose instead to beat Bagman savagely while Billy, enclosed in another
cell, can only watch.
The body plays prominently in this crucial sequence in two ways. First,
it is the brutal beating that marks the real breaking point in the film’s

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narrative—the point at which Billy’s efforts to hold his troupe together

begin to fail. As Billy and Bagman are arrested, Billy insists that the troupe
stay put and await their return, but as soon as the police car drives away,
Linet, the ostensible queen of the troupe, countermands the order and
instructs the members of the group to hurry on to their next location.
Even after the duo are released, the trust in the old system seems funda-
mentally broken. Second, the beating is not visited upon Billy, whose body
represents the core moral order, but upon one of his subjects. In this way,
Billy is denied the opportunity to provide any level of martyrdom for his
kingdom and instead must sit powerless in an adjoining cell.
The failure of Billy’s leadership manifests primarily through the frag-
mentation that settles into the troupe. Even the performances become
more chaotic and disorderly, and in one important sequence, the jousts
are disrupted by motorcycle-riding hooligans who have brought their
own weaponry and armor. The battle between the trained knights and the
amateur townsfolk is for all intents and purposes a slaughter, but when
the still-injured Billy enters the fray, he sustains what we will later learn
is a near-fatal blow. At this point, Morgan and his compatriots decide to
leave the troupe and strike off on their own. The remaining members of
the community, including Alan, the narrative’s version of Lancelot, are
left in a malaise as the fellowship that had sustained them disintegrates,
but in spite of this, Billy insists that the troupe remain and wait for the
return of Morgan and the dissident knights.
In many ways, it would have been easy for Romero to paint Billy as
either a valiant defender of the faith or as a stubborn fool unable to adapt
to changing times, but the film remains ambivalent. At the heart of this
ambivalence is the dogmatic and charismatic figure of Billy—powerfully
portrayed by Ed Harris—who is engaged in a hopeless battle to bring
medieval virtues into the modern world. Billy is an anachronism; indeed,
as we first see him during the opening credits, he is lying with his queen,
Linet, on a rug of animal fur in a glade. He rises to begin a morning
ritual of purification—self-flagellation with a branch—and then clothes
himself in leather and armor. It is only as he mounts his motorcycle that
the film reveals itself to be in contemporary time. In some obvious ways,
Billy is not of the contemporary time—evidenced by his refusal of the
trappings of modern capitalism and media fame and his relentless com-
mitment to and reliance on a code of chivalrous conduct—but in other
ways, Billy and his troupe clearly belong to the early era in which the film
was released. It is worth recalling that by 1981, the baby boomers who had
populated the flower power generation were growing up and becoming

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Reagan Democrats and corporate raiders. Billy stands as a stark reminder

of the ideals of an earlier generation—ideals of honor and community—
and in the first act of the film, it is clear that these ideals have provided
a stable framework within which this eccentric but loving community
could grow. In this regard, it is notable just how inclusive the community
of the troupe is, embracing people from various races, classes, and even
sexual orientations.7
The parallel between the struggles of Billy and his troupe and the
broader American culture of the early 1980s is notable. The 1980 campaign
by Ronald Reagan had called forth a particularly potent notion of tradi-
tion—one steeped in American exceptionalism and a promise of a “new
morning in America”—but the “Reagan Revolution” was also grounded
upon a deeply individualistic strand of capitalism. The theory of “trickle-
down economics,” upon which Reagan established much of his political
philosophy, presumes that the economic gain of wealthy individuals would
“trickle down” to the lower classes, and thus conditions should be crafted
such that the wealthiest might be able to pursue even greater wealth. The
move to “trickle-down economics” represented not only a shift in specific
economic policies—like taxation and regulation—but also a reversal of
the policies established by President Roosevelt in the New Deal. Those
earlier fiscal and social policies had set forth an ethic whereby the collec-
tive body was responsible to maintain minimum standards for even the
poorest, and those who had attained greater wealth would be expected to
carry more of the social burden. A similar debate can be seen circulating
within Romero’s Knightriders. A tumultuous community meeting that
occurs as Billy and Bagman return revolves around tensions between the
performing knights and the crafts sellers about expenses and the sharing
of profits. This is precisely the kind of class conflict that seemed to be
brewing during the rise of individualistic capitalism and trickle-down
economics in the early 1980s.
The tensions within the troupe reach a breaking point after the battle
between the troupe’s riders and the group of townies who have fashioned
their own armor. In the melee, Billy engages a young Native American
rider whose breastplate is emblazoned with a black bird—the symbol
of doom haunting Billy’s dreams throughout the film. Billy bests the
young, inexperienced rider, but the physical stress is too much for his
broken body, and at the end of their battle, Billy collapses. The fall of
Billy marks the moment when the troupe is finally shattered, and in the
aftermath, the various parties—Morgan, Alan, and others—head their
separate ways while the last remaining core members set up camp and

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wait. But what is particularly interesting in light of the broader analysis

of Romero’s films developed in this section is the relationship between
Billy’s physical body and the community of the troupe. As Billy’s body
deteriorates—albeit in a more realistic and less spectacular way than in
Romero’s other films—his hold on power also weakens and so too do the
bonds of affection and loyalty that bind the troupe to him and to each
other. The parallel between the body of the ruler and the body politic has
a long and established legacy within Western conceptions of governance.
The medieval notion of the king’s “two bodies” is best summarized by
Edmund Plowden, who, writing in the sixteenth century, observed the
legal doctrine that “the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural,
and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body
mortal, subject to all infirmities that come by Nature or Accident. . . . But
his Body Politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of
Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People,
and the Management of the public weal.”8 This doctrine, which on its
surface seems quite bizarre, suggests both the separateness and integral
interrelatedness of the sovereign as an individual and as a legal entity.
While the peculiarities of this medieval political fiction are no longer
followed, it remains an influential part of the foundation of Western
notions of both governance and jurisprudence.9 For our purposes, what
is most striking is the mythological connection established between the
body of the leader and the political/social body of the community. The
physical body of the leader, in this construction, creates a concrete link
to the political body of the land, and in this way the leader becomes a
physical manifestation of the social relations within his or her purview.
As contemporary commentator Laurie Finke puts it, the “political” body
of the sovereign “provides a means of imagining the nation, supplying a
temporal continuity.”10
Versions of the Arthurian legend have portrayed this connection such
that the injured and dying body of the king quite literally leads to the
dying of the land. In John Boorman’s epic Excalibur (1981), released the
same year as Romero’s film, there are striking sequences of trees literally
withering as the king lies dying and then, in a later sequence, reviving
and blossoming as Arthur is restored to health. In Romero’s retelling of
the Arthur legend, the body of the king also plays an interesting role as
it mirrors the community, and his collapse after the battle with the Black
Knight marks the fracturing and collapse of the kingdom he has created.
But unlike the traditional Arthurian legend in which the king’s body is
restored and so too his reign and the health of his kingdom, Romero

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maintains his ambivalent stance. As Billy lies injured and unwell, Morgan
seeks to establish his own kingdom in the form of the splinter group of
knights who don shiny, new made-for-television armor and prepare to
enter a lucrative new phase of their careers. Their potential success is
cut short, however, as the errant knights fall to infighting and bickering.
So, too, the malaise of an unresolved kingdom overwhelms Alan and his
companions, and it is Alan, the erstwhile Lancelot, who recognizes that
while the king may have two bodies, a kingdom cannot have two kings.
Alan and his colleague confront Morgan: “There can only be one king,
Morgan. You can’t just split off and start over again whenever you want.
We both know that inside. There can only be one king at one time, that’s
the law.” This sets the stage for the final battle between the knights loyal
to Billy and those supporting Morgan.
The battle’s conclusion is, in some ways, surprising. Morgan, the rival
of King Billy, bests Alan in the climactic moment and is then crowned as
the new king, although, as Billy places the crown upon his rival’s head,
he does so with a smile that speaks both to his relief at no longer bearing
the burden of leadership and, perhaps, to his faith that the traditions and
principles of the troupe remain intact. The principle of the two bodies
is here manifested. The old king’s body—Billy—passes away while the
second, political, body of the king is manifested in a new person. That
Morgan suddenly reverses his previous intent to license the troupe to
lucrative commercial interests and instead embraces the older values of
the kingdom upon being crowned is evidence that the body of the king
is indeed now incarnated within him.
Relinquishing the crown—and thereby the political body of the king—
Billy is released from his place of responsibility and travels out to finish
the film’s one unresolved conflict, that with the deputies who forced him
to witness the brutal beating of his comrade. Billy returns to the small
town and finds the offending deputy in a fast food restaurant, where he
proceeds to beat him viciously in front of a cheering group of patrons.
Before leaving the town, the former king finds the young boy for whom
he had refused to sign an autograph earlier in the film and without a word
hands him his belt and sword. This will be Billy’s final act. The loss of
blood and injuries that have plagued him throughout the film prove too
much, and as he drives down the highway, he begins to hallucinate that
he is on a horse, galloping into battle, before veering into the path of an
oncoming tractor-trailer.11
Fittingly, the film’s final moments linger over the funeral of Billy as
the various members of the troupe stand around his grave in the midst

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of a thunderstorm and one of the minstrels sings a song about loss and
castles tumbling. The black crow is seen on a treetop on the edge of the
funeral, the prophecy now fulfilled, but perhaps more important, the
family of the troupe has been reconnected. Here at the funeral of their
fallen former king, the members of the troupe assemble in unison before
driving off to continue their way of life, the way of life founded on King
Billy but now living beyond his mortal body in a new king, a connection
foreshadowed earlier in the film when Billy explains to the recently beaten
Bagman, “You’ve got to fight for your ideals, and if you die your ideals
don’t die.” It is the funeral sequence that underscores the endurance of
Billy’s principles and the connection between the body, community, and
traditions that have nurtured and sustained this idealistic troupe and will
continue to sustain them as they head into an uncertain future.

Romero’s Body Rhetoric

The funeral that ends Romero’s Knightriders stands in interesting contrast
to the cemetery moment that began his career in Night of the Living Dead.
In Night, the cemetery reminds us of the distinction between the physical
body and the cultural relations that constrain it, where in Knightriders
the funeral reminds us that the relations created by a person linger on
after their body has been interred. But in both instances, in spite of their
divergent tones, Romero’s attention remains on the intersection of the
body and the broader culture. The consistency of this focus, as I’ve tried
to demonstrate in the preceding pages, is remarkable and occurs in almost
every film Romero has directed, though, to his credit, he has approached
this focus in various ways and to various ends.12
In my reading, I have grouped the majority of Romero’s films around
three broad themes derived from the ways the body functions. The first
and most spectacular and recognizable use of the body in Romero’s films
is as a point of critical contrast whereby the unconstrained bodies of the
living dead—or later the crazies—provide a means by which Romero
can dislodge certain tendencies in the broader culture for scrutiny and
critique. A second grouping of films—Monkey Shines, The Dark Half, and
Bruiser—revolves around the body as a site of struggle between bodily/
animal desires and social norms of constraint, and the final grouping,
of Martin and Knightriders, attends to the mythic body and its place in
our conceptions of life and death, chaos and order, desire and discipline.
Read in this way, Romero’s films explore the various dimensions of our
bodily existence, ranging from the recalcitrance of the human body as
an object against which much of our cultural norms and regulations are

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directed, to the struggle occurring with the regulated body as it becomes

the battleground between unrealized appetites and desires and thousands
of years of established codes of civilized conduct, to the place of the
mythic body at the foundation of our understandings of life and death.
In addition to the various ways in which Romero deploys the body
within his films, it is also notable that these narratives adapt to address the
particular political/cultural climate in which the filmmaker worked. The
anonymous pale bodies of the living dead surrounding the farmhouse in
Night and the blank face of Henry Creedlow in Bruiser may both represent
the unconstrained body, but the ways in which these bodies function as
points of critique differ markedly. In this way, while Romero’s fortunes as
a filmmaker have risen and fallen across his lengthy and ongoing career,
his unique and inventive use of the human body as a critical instru-
ment has continued to adapt to its times. Perhaps more than any other
American filmmaker of the past few decades, Romero has interrogated
the tangled web of cultural, political, religious, and economic forces that
have enmeshed our culture and sought to direct our bodies.

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 Part Two

Gothic Dimensions in the Films of Wes Craven

Wes Craven’s segment in Paris Je T’aime (2006)—a collection of eighteen

short films by different directors devoted to the diverse arrondissements
of the city—is set in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, but, perhaps surpris-
ingly, it is not a tale of terror. The light and breezy short film follows an
engaged British couple as the woman searches for the grave of Oscar
Wilde. Tension between the two lovers emerges because of the young
man’s lack of a romantic, fun-loving spirit, and after kissing the tomb
of Wilde, the woman runs away, decrying her fiancé’s inability to make
her laugh. While giving chase, the man falls and bangs his head against
Wilde’s tombstone, whereupon he is visited by the spirit of the dead poet,
who declares that losing the fiancée would lead to “death of the heart.”
Catching up to his girlfriend, the young man woos her back by quoting
two of Wilde’s best-loved lines, presumably supplied by the disembodied
spirit of Wilde himself, and we glimpse the spirit again before the couple
run away, laughing, out of the cemetery grounds.
At first glance, this might seem an odd filmic exercise for the director
who helped to bring a particularly sadistic brutality to American horror
in films like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes and whose
creation of Freddy Krueger breathed new life into the ubiquitous slasher
films of the mid-1980s. But in other ways, this simple, short film reveals
a great deal about the central conceit at work in most of Craven’s films,
namely his exploration of the gothic.
Since its inception in English literature in the late eighteenth century,
the gothic has centered around the thin line that exists between the
world of day, and with it reason, rationality, normalcy, and the world of

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night, and with it superstition, illusion, madness. The nocturnal world of

the gothic is that of lost traditions, barbarism, and savagery and is filled
with mysterious supernatural creatures—or at least the belief in such
creatures. This nocturnal world arises in stark contrast and in contest
with the world in which we regularly live, a world that assures us that
all things can be understood through rationality and common sense.1 In
gothic narratives, there is a struggle between these worlds, and the par-
ticipants in this contest must try to navigate the thin line separating dark
from light and the natural from the supernatural. Craven’s sensibilities
have always been drawn back to the gothic, even in his more brutal and
savage films. In particular, his work demonstrates a fascination with the
uncertain dividing point between reality and the fantastic.
Consider, for example, Craven’s brief vignette set in Père Lachaise.
In spite of the fact that the segment is not frightening or meant to ter-
rify, the story’s core is pure gothic. The fiancé’s fall is a precursor to the
sudden appearance of the spirit of Oscar Wilde, and at this point, two
important elements of the gothic come into play. First, the appearance
of a ghost—clearly an element of the nocturnal world—suggests that the
boundary between the two spheres has been somehow breached, and
second, there is a lingering uncertainty about the reality of this appear-
ing spirit. Is this the actual spirit of Oscar Wilde come from the grave
to impart romantic advice to the struggling young suitor, or is this some
neurological side effect of the recent blow to his head? Such ambiguity
plays a crucial role in the development of gothic narratives. Not only are
we made aware of the unreliability of the narrator—are we seeing a real
ghost or just a delusion generated by the protagonist’s imagination?—but
we, like the disoriented young man, must seek to puzzle out the nature
of this suddenly appearing spirit. Writing about gothic literature, Robert
Hume observes that “the reader is held in suspense with the character,”
and in this way the reader, or viewer, becomes a more active participant in
the narrative, attempting, as does the protagonist, to sift through reality
and illusion, the rational and the supernatural.2
Beyond simply challenging our assumptions about the world and our
regular ways of perceiving, gothic literature’s contest between diurnal
and nocturnal worlds involves a kind of nascent cultural critique. The
nocturnal world is often presented as a mirror image of the everyday
world of light and reason but an image that is distorted and twisted; the
habitual approaches to our world are challenged as we are confronted with
things that are both familiar and unfamiliar. In this way, Craven’s films
most directly inflect the Freudian notion of the uncanny discussed in this

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volume’s introduction. As Freud observes, “The uncanny is that species

of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had
long been familiar.”3 The uncanny is often associated with dreams but
can also occur in waking moments when something familiar becomes
strange—like walking around the outside of your house at midnight when
all the well-known shapes of shrubs and trees can take on a menacing
and surreal quality. At the heart of Freud’s conception of the uncanny is
the connection between “what is familiar and comfortable” on the one
hand and “what is concealed and kept hidden” on the other.4 Here, Freud’s
well-known concern for repression becomes evident as the uncanny is
one way that those things “kept hidden” reemerge into our world through
the transformation of the familiar objects around us—people, homes,
objects—into things that seem strange and unfamiliar.
Gothic literature functions along lines discerned by Freud and uti-
lizes the emergence of those things repressed by the diurnal world in the
form of the strange entities of the world of night. The appearance of the
nocturnal world’s uncanny creatures forces upon both the protagonist
and the viewer a space for reflection about those norms that underlie
regular understandings. As Charlene Bunnel explains, it is “the nocturnal
world in which the artificial layers of social behavior, religious ritual, and
familial duty repressing instinct and intuition are stripped away.”5 The
parallels to Freudian thought are clear here: the nocturnal world can be
envisioned as representing our unconscious id—the realm in which our
repressed desires linger—while the rational world of the day resembles
the realm of the superego with its restrictions and regulations. This point
seems quite clearly made in Craven’s brief vignette set in Père Lachaise
as it is the encounter with the spectral Oscar Wilde that strips away the
young man’s stiff and serious exterior and forces him to encounter his
more unpredictable and romantic side.
As noted, Wes Craven’s films have consistently worried the gothic line
between reality and the fantastic and utilized the emerging nocturnal
world as a mechanism to strip away layers of social veneer and pretense.
In several of these films, Craven has utilized an explicitly gothic motif
in which something fantastic has emerged from the nocturnal world
and threatens to undo the characters’ rational way of life. Certainly this
is most obvious in his creation of Freddy Krueger in the highly influen-
tial 1984 film A Nightmare on Elm Street and his only directorial return
to this character in his 1994 film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. As I
seek to demonstrate throughout the chapters in this section, however, a
gothic sensibility has informed most of his filmmaking and can be seen

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 Gothic Dimensions in the Films of Wes Craven

operating in such diverse films as The Last House on the Left, Shocker,
and Scream. Indeed, one of the things that makes Craven interesting as a
genre filmmaker is the diversity of styles and stories he has engaged even
while generally remaining within the broader parameters of horror. On
the surface, a low-budget exploitation film like The Hills Have Eyes bears
only passing resemblance to a bigger-budget action thriller like Red Eye
(2005), and yet a semblance of the gothic tension between the rational
and the irrational world lingers in virtually all his work. In the following
chapters, then, I pursue the gothic line running throughout most of Wes
Craven’s films and explore some of the concomitant motifs and themes
that emerge across his larger body of work.

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 4
Craven’s Gothic Form: Nightmares, Screams, and Monsters

Wes Craven’s 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street was not his first foray into
horror, nor even his first film to create a public stir. Some twelve years
before his demonic Freddy Krueger emerged, Craven had shocked the
American public with the savage Last House on the Left, but in spite of his
early and later successes, it is likely that decades from now Craven will be
best remembered for creating the wisecracking dream killer who would
go on to be featured in seven sequels and a short-lived television show
and spawn innumerable toys, posters, and other paraphernalia.1 As an
example of the hysteria, in 1991 the mayor of Los Angeles even declared a
“Freddy Krueger Day” in honor of the horror character.2 While the extent
of the mainstream popularity of Freddy Krueger remains a puzzle, the
popularity of the film itself seems logical. Since John Carpenter’s 1978
film Halloween, the “stalk and slash” film had become the dominant form
of horror in American cinema, and Carpenter’s masked killer generated
numerous imitations in films ranging from Friday the 13th to My Bloody
Valentine (1981). By the mid-1980s, the formula had become remarkably
rigid—masked killer impaling naughty teens with primitive weapons
while tracking down an awkward and often alienated female target whom
Carol Clover would infamously dub the “Final Girl.”3 Of course, the for-
mula had also become fairly stale.
With Nightmare, Craven took the standard formula—almost all of
which remains intact in his film—and adds a crucial twist: Krueger exists
only in the dreams of his victims, and his murderous deeds in their night-
mares cause them to actually die. The blurring of the lines between wak-
ing and dreaming clearly establishes Nightmare and its sequels within

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the broad parameters of the gothic and the journey between diurnal
and nocturnal world, and indeed, what makes Nightmare important for
my reading of Craven’s overall body of work is that it is the first film in
which he brings together all the various gothic dimensions that had, as I
demonstrate later in this chapter, existed in his early work.
In this chapter, I want to attend to this blurring quality in Craven’s
films by focusing on his use of gothic form as a framing structure. While
this structure is evident in almost all of Craven’s pictures, here I focus on
some of the more spectacular examples—his two Nightmare films, the
Scream series, and some of his engagements with traditional gothic tales.
These films offer some of the most spectacular examples of Craven’s gothic
tendencies and allow an entry point to thinking about how this gothic
form frames both Craven’s narratives and the experience of viewing them.
In exploring this more fully, let me begin by observing that A Night-
mare on Elm Street is a quintessentially gothic narrative. In the plot, a
child murderer—Freddy Krueger—has been released by a loophole in
the law; the angry parents of Elm Street rally together and in an act of
vigilante justice burn him alive in his home. The film begins several years
later as the now teenage surviving children on Elm Street are plagued by
nightmares featuring Krueger, who has become a disfigured and mon-
strous demonic creature. Nancy, the protagonist, her friend Tina, and
their respective boyfriends become aware of sharing similar nightmares,
and during one of the girls’ slumber parties, Tina is brutally murdered in
her dream—resulting in the horrific death of her physical body. Unwilling
to accept the notion of a dream-demon, police arrest Tina’s boyfriend,
who is later killed by Freddy in his jail cell while sleeping—although the
death appears a suicide. Nancy determines to beat Freddy by pulling
him out of her dreams and into the real world, a feat she performed once
before with his dusty old hat during a session in a sleep clinic. But before
her plan can come to fruition, Freddy murders her boyfriend, Glen. As
the police—led by Nancy’s estranged father—investigate Glen’s murder
at his home across the street, Nancy constructs a series of booby traps
in her home before finally managing to bring Freddy out of her dream
and into reality. After an extended chase throughout Nancy’s house, she
manages to set Freddy on fire, only to find that the killer has murdered
her mother, and as her father arrives, Freddy and the mother disappear
into an abyss. It is at this point that Nancy realizes it is her fear that
gives Freddy his power, and as he reappears, she turns her back on him
and tells him: “I take back every bit of energy I gave you. You’re nothing.
You’re shit.” Suddenly, Freddy vanishes, and Nancy finds herself awake

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and leaving her house for school. The street is covered in a luminescent
fog and all is shining white as Nancy meets her friends, now alive again.
But as the kids drive away, the top of their convertible violently slams shut
to reveal the colors of Freddy’s dirty red and green sweater, the car now
presumably under Freddy’s control. Then the monstrous killer reaches
through the door of the house to drag Nancy’s mother back inside, and
the film abruptly ends.
The core elements of the gothic are evident even in this abbreviated
synopsis of the film. Some past crime—here, the burning of Freddy
Krueger—continues to haunt the space of its occurrence, and the unwit-
ting protagonist stumbles upon this dangerous intersection of the world
of day and the world of night. Importantly, the addition of the “dream”
dimension accentuates the unreliability of the narrator and the narra-
tive. On several occasions in the film, it is temporarily unclear whether
Nancy—or earlier, Tina—is dreaming or awake. The initial moments of
these dream sequences begin in the regular world, and it is only slowly
that we realize the dream facsimile of their real world. In one scene, Nancy
is in her English class listening to students reading from Julius Caesar
as she mourns the death of Tina. As she puts her head on the desk, the
voices of the students alter, and we hear not Julius Caesar but a line from
Hamlet—“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of
infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.” Nancy lifts her head to
see the corpse of Tina standing before her, covered in a bloody body bag,
and a terrifying dream sequence commences in which Freddy pursues
Nancy through the halls of the school.
With Nightmare, Craven begins a series of experiments with the formal
nature of film and the experience of film, experiments that would become
crucial for many of his most successful pictures over the coming decades.
In Nightmare, as with several of Craven’s other films, the question is not
simply the confrontation between forces of good and evil but a blurring
of the line that crafts our understanding of reality itself. The viewers
become active participants in seeking to reestablish the line between
illusion and reality, dreaming and waking life. The play in Nightmare
between reality and fantasy adds an important dimension to Craven’s
work and became an increasingly popular motif in horror films after his
1984 picture. William Egginton observed the rise of horror films after
Nightmare that troubled the nature of reality and labeled the phenom-
enon “reality bleeding,” by which he meant the ways in which the filmic
narrative seemed to “bleed” out into “reality.” Egginton notes, “Given that
the loss of reality is a priori one of the most unsettling feelings one can

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have, it should come as no surprise to learn that bleeding came into its
own as a technique peculiar to horror films.” 4 In Nightmare, this motif
centers on the uncertain slippage between waking and dreaming, and
the fear of this slippage manifests in the film as a general concern for the
victim’s sanity. Nancy’s mother, father, and doctors are convinced she is
losing her grip on reality, even after she suddenly holds the battered hat
of Freddy Krueger in the midst of a sleep study in a controlled clinic room
and in spite of the fact that she knows details about the killer she could
not have known. Her boyfriend, Glen, doubts her sanity, even though he
has evidently experienced similar nightmares.
It is worth noting as well that blurring of dreaming and waking life
mirrors in some ways the experience of the film audience. As more than
one commentator has observed, the act of viewing a film is much like
experiencing a dream—an audiovisual series of illusions designed to trick
us into believing we have had some series of experiences.5 In his seminal
book Caligari’s Children, S. S. Prawer describes how the cinema, “with its
darkened auditorium, its viewing angle (usually slightly from below), its
large screen . . . [and] its capacity of making the camera to some extent
our eyes, offers its patrons a unique chance to regard what is happening on
the screen as their own dream.”6 There is, thus, a kind of “reality bleeding”
going on in the very experience of film—an illusory experience that to be
successful must lead us to suspend our existing knowledge of its artifice
and engage it more deeply. But, even more to the point, there is something
of a gothic dimension to film viewing. Barry Brummett makes the point
well in his exploration of haunted house films and in his suggestion that
the experience of viewing a film is similar to a haunting—the viewing of
events from some other world being played out before our eyes—and to
otherworldly ways: “Three dimensional audiences psychologically enter
two dimensional spaces, [and] we see things, and from spatial positions,
which no character in the movie possibly could, and we are taken in and
out of the space occupied by the ghosts themselves.”7 It is this uncanny
experience of the blurred boundary between reality and illusion—ren-
dered here in terms of waking life and nightmares—that is the central
driving theme of much of Craven’s work.
Before turning to the ways this theme is developed in a few of his later
films, it is worth noting at least two other interrelated gothic motifs that,
as I try to demonstrate in this chapter, pervade Craven’s filmmaking. The
first is the gothic body. As I noted in chapter 3, the body is a staple of
horror films, and for some filmmakers—notably George Romero but also

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David Cronenberg and others—the body becomes an important element

both in their aesthetic and critical frameworks. Not surprisingly, the body
also plays a crucial role in the horror of Wes Craven, but in his films, as
exemplified in Nightmare, the body stands at the complex intersection of
reality and illusion and is often wrapped up in the blurring of the bound-
ary between the two. In Nightmare, this blurring works in two ways.
First is the conceit that if individuals “die” in their dreams—which is to
say that their “dream bodies” die—then their real, material bodies will
die. Further, there is a direct correlation between the damage done to a
“dream body” and the wounds opened on the real body, so that when Tina
is slashed in her dream encounter with Freddy, her real (and sleeping)
body begins to bleed, and when Nancy awakens herself to escape Freddy
by holding her dream arm to the hot pipe coming out of a dream boiler,
her real, awakened arm shows a burn mark. The second way in which
Craven blurs real and illusory bodies is in the physical body of Freddy
Krueger. As a creature of fantasy, he is not so clearly bound by the dictum
that what happens in a dream affects him, and indeed, as he stalks his prey
through their dreams, he takes some delight in acts of self-mutilation. He
gleefully chops off his own fingers with the knife-fingered glove he wears,
cuts open his own abdomen to reveal oozing guts, and even pulls his own
face off to reveal a cackling skull beneath. These are not so much acts of
masochism, especially in that Krueger does not seem to feel any pain in
his self-mutilation, as they are demonstrations of Krueger’s own gothic
body. This gothic body is one that lies on the peculiar fault line between
the real and the fantastic such that while Krueger can harm others, his
body retains the ability to remain unharmed.8 Further, Krueger himself
seems utterly unbound by the laws of physical reality—he appears and
disappears at will, his arms stretch out to several yards in length as he
menaces Tina, a telephone receiver becomes his mouth as he threatens
Nancy. In all the Nightmare films, including Craven’s subsequent New
Nightmare, the body lies at the intersection of fantasy and reality. Craven
seems to suggest that while our fantasies—no matter how dark—are not
bound by the realities of our physical world, they will leave a physical
mark, a psychic residue that bears real consequences.
The gothic body offers a substantial challenge to our conceptions of
normal. As David Putnam notes, “The existence of a monster therefore
poses the utmost threat to the law; and our readerly pleasure in the situ-
ation of the monster has its origins, I suggest, in our apprehension of the
dismantling, if only for a certain moment, of the discourse of the law. The

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monster thus takes on some of the contours of carnival.”9 In the body of

Freddy Krueger, we find an almost cartoonish fluidity in physical form,
and this malleability underscores the killer’s existence outside the bounds
of our cultural and natural norms.

Freddy’s fantastic gothic body expands to threaten Heather’s son in Wes

Craven’s New Nightmare. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).

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The second motif worth observing here is the fixation on the gothic
house. The notion of a “gothic house,” a mysterious structure of peril in
which past crimes and secrets continue to haunt, can be traced back to
the eighteenth century in novels like The Castle Otranto by Horace Wald-
pole and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe.10 Contemporary
filmmakers, including Wes Craven, have reconceptualized the crumbling
castles of traditional gothic stories and refocused attention on the hid-
den crimes and secrets lurking in contemporary American architecture.
Craven’s films are not filled with crumbling old houses but tend to be set
in the contemporary American suburb with its white picket fences and
marks of affluence.11 Nightmare takes pains to reveal, however, that there
are dark secrets even in the most prosperous neighborhoods, and these
well-appointed houses serve as their receptacles. A good example of this
is the climactic sequence in which Nancy goes looking for Freddy in her
dream. She awakens in her bedroom and travels down the stairs to the
main level of the house, then down again into the basement, and it is at
this point we see the first clues that she has slipped into Freddy’s world.
Searching for the charred remains of Freddy’s glove, which her mother
had kept bundled up in the family’s furnace, Nancy finds the glove miss-
ing and then hears the tell-tale screeching sound of his knives scraping
metal. She then proceeds down another flight of stairs into a subterranean
world beneath the basement, a world filled with an endless boiler room
and pipes and hallways. This is Freddy’s world—a nightmarish recreation
of the boiler room in which he committed his earthly crimes and in which
almost all his victims in Nightmare find themselves eventually.
The architectural imagery is revealing and follows in a literary tradition
in which the physical dimensions of a character’s home bear, as Marilyn
Chandler puts it, “a direct relationship or resemblance to the structure
of [his or her] psyche and inner life.” In Nightmare, and indeed in most of
Craven’s films, the pristine outer structure of the house conceals a dan-
gerously rotten core. Within the walls of Tina’s suburban home we find
a mother who shows more concern for her “date” than for her daughter,
and we learn that her father has abandoned the family. Nancy’s is also a
fractured family; her police officer father has left her and her alcoholic
mother. The secrets that lie hidden in these homes fester, and the crimes
of the past—here the murder of Freddy Krueger—linger. It is notable that
the journey into the heart of this dark secret is always downward. Down
flights of stairs and into a space that lies beneath the real basement in
the dark and fantastic cellar where Freddy’s boiler room remains. The
basement is a notably gothic space and home to any number of fictional

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creatures. As Gaston Bachelard observes in his insightful study The Poet-

ics of Space, the basement is “first and foremost the dark entity of the
house” and the place of “buried madness and walled-in tragedy.”12 It is
telling, therefore, that Nancy’s quest to vanquish Freddy leads her down
into that subterranean and dark space to draw out the “buried madness
and walled-in tragedy” and lead them upstairs where she may vanquish
them—at least temporarily.
As noted, A Nightmare on Elm Street contains many of the gothic ele-
ments that animate Craven’s earlier films and would continue to appear
in his later works. In particular, Craven’s attention to the thin line that
separates the real world from that of the fantastic became a prominent
theme in his later work, especially his 1994 return to Elm Street in the film
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. In this picture, Craven revisits the Freddy
Krueger mythos but cleverly circumvents the series of sequels—directed
by others—by setting the film within the “real world” surrounding the
first Nightmare film. New Nightmare centers around Heather Langen-
kamp, the actress who played Nancy, who plays herself as the actress who
formerly played Nancy in Nightmare. The plot focuses on plans to make
a new Nightmare film and on the apparent efforts of a real spirit of evil
to manifest itself as Freddy Krueger.
Where the original Nightmare relied on the single dividing line between
being awake and dreaming, in New Nightmare Craven folds this dividing
line into another narrative conceit—namely the film-within-a-film motif.
The device utilized here is mise-en-abyme, a mirroring mechanism where
elements within the film become duplications of the film itself, and the
device becomes doubled in New Nightmare. The complicated layers of mir-
roring—and thus the complicated and intersecting lines dividing dream
from reality and film from film—accentuate the uncertainty produced
in the original film. A brief exploration of the opening scene may help to
clarify these layers. New Nightmare begins with images of what appears to
be Freddy crafting a new version of his knife-glove but this time through
the creation of some kind of bionic hand. As “Freddy” prepares to chop off
his real hand to make place for his new weapon, the camera pulls back to
reveal that the sequence has taken place on a film set, and we see Heather
Langenkamp, the actress, with her husband, an effects engineer, and son on
the set of the new film. But something goes wrong. The animatronic effects
version of the Freddy bionic hand goes awry—seemingly possessed by some
evil spirit—and proceeds to kill two of the assistants and Langenkamp’s
husband before pursuing her young son. It is then that the scene shifts
back again to reveal that the preceding has been Langenkamp’s nightmare.

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In this opening sequence, Craven accelerates the blurring of reality that

was a staple of his original Nightmare. The “reality” of Freddy’s return is
displaced by the filmic production that then is displaced by the apparent
supernatural intrusion of Freddy’s spirit that then is displaced by the sud-
den awakening of Heather and the revelation that this was all a dream. For
Craven, however, the lines between illusion and reality—or here, between
filmic illusion, supernatural intrusion, and nightmare—are not so read-
ily restored, and as the film progresses, the events of her dream seem to
become a reality, at least in consequence. Langenkamp’s husband, we
learn, has been commissioned by New Line Cinema to create a new Freddy
glove for a planned revival of the franchise, and he later dies in a horrific
car accident that we see is caused by the sudden, supernatural appearance
of Freddy’s glove attacking him while he drives. When a grieving Heather
arrives to view the body, she sees that the wound on his chest resembles
the claw marks left by the animatronic Freddy glove in her dream. Even
the two effects assistants are found dead, having been slashed to death in
ways that mirror the actions in the opening “dream sequence.”
That Craven is seeking to unsettle our commonsense boundaries
between fiction and reality is evident throughout the film. In perhaps the
most revealing and complex scene, Heather visits Wes Craven himself
to discuss the apparent influence of the fictional Freddy Krueger in their
“real” world. Craven explains his theory, namely that there is an ancient
evil force in the universe and that from time to time it is captured by
storytellers and contained within narratives that confine it in one form
for a period of time. In Craven’s understanding of his own work, this spirit
became captured in his story about Freddy Krueger and now is seeking to
return in that form. In this reflective moment, Craven observes that the
demonic force has been released with the conclusion of the Elm Street
saga, and “now that the films have ended, the genie is out of the bottle.”
Craven also suggests that his new screenplay is coming directly from his
own nightmares and that somehow the unfolding of this tale is mirror-
ing the actual events within the “real world” of the film. In a particu-
larly complex moment, Craven tells Heather that she will have to make a
choice—“whether or not you’re willing to play Nancy one last time”—and
over his shoulder we see the entire scene had already been written on his
computer. The complexity of this narrative sequence—Craven’s dream
as foretelling the real events that are to become the basis for a film that
will become the film within the film—takes the simpler gothic duality of
the earlier Nightmare to its logical and mind-bending conclusion. In this
way, the multiple layers of mirrored narrative realities—dreams, scripts,

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films-within-films, and so on—bleed so thoroughly into each other that

any clear standpoint becomes virtually impossible. It is also worth noting
the film’s use of a series of earthquakes to underscore the world-out-of-
balance motif. Indeed, the damage done by the earthquake so parallels the
reemergence of Freddy’s spirit that cracks in one of the walls in Heather’s
house open to replicate the four slash marks from Freddy’s glove. In this
way, both the natural and the supernatural, as well as dreams, films, and
“reality,” blur beyond recognition.
The redoubling of the mise-en-abyme in Craven’s New Nightmare
serves not only to enhance and complicate the gothic aesthetic evident in
his earlier work but also to create a reflective space. Casting the film—or
at least one layer of the film—within the world of film production affords
Craven the opportunity to reflect upon the practice and morality of mak-
ing the kinds of films he has made, and New Nightmare offers several
layers of such reflection. Heather is central to much of this moral debate;
a substantial focus is on her accountability for working in films like Night-
mare. Specifically, on several occasions, one being a television interview
about the tenth anniversary of the first Nightmare film, she is asked or
challenged about whether she would allow her son to watch such movies.
Much of the focus on the psychic effects of violent and horrific films
like Nightmare is a result of Heather’s young son, Dylan. In a particularly
telling plot twist, it is Dylan who first senses the appearance of Freddy
Krueger, and he is clearly the target of the villainous killer. As the film
progresses, Freddy’s spirit possesses the small boy on several occasions,
and in another revealing and complex sequence, Heather awakens to
find Dylan in the living room while the original Nightmare plays on the
television. Dylan speaks to her in a low, guttural voice and proclaims,
“Never sleep again,” before revealing that he has taped kitchen knives to
his fingers and begins taking murderous swipes at his mother. Heather
awakens to find that this was all just a dream, but a causal line of con-
nections begins to emerge. Dylan is possessed by the murderous spirit of
Freddy, and this possession is linked to the viewing of Craven’s original
Nightmare. That this is a comment on the widespread and ongoing public
debates about the influence of violent media on children becomes clear
as Heather seeks to find medical help for her clearly disturbed child—it
is only late in the film that Heather accepts the notion that her child’s
problems are the result of the malevolent influence of Freddy himself. A
doctor at the hospital where Dylan is being seen confronts Heather by
asking, “You haven’t shown him any of the films you’ve made, the horror
stuff? . . . I’m convinced those films can send an unstable child over the

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edge.” Even after Heather comes to realize that the supernatural events
surrounding her are not delusions, the doctor has Dylan tranquilized,
forcing him to sleep and unleashing the final conflict with Freddy.
As Heather returns home searching for her son—who has escaped the
hospital—she finds her former costar John Saxton, who had played her
father in the earlier film, but he greets her as Nancy and talks about her
deceased mother. Heather Langenkamp’s spacious California home sud-
denly becomes the house at 1428 Elm Street, and at this point Heather/
Nancy knows that the only way forward is to let herself be immersed into
the filmic/fantastic world of Freddy. As in the original Nightmare, the only
way to confront Freddy is on his terms, and so Heather/Nancy takes a pill
to induce sleep and finds herself sliding down—again down—through her
bed and into a nightmarish Hieronymus Bosch version of hell filled with
classic architecture, demonic statues, and snakes. Here, Heather/Nancy
and Dylan play out their final battle with Freddy Krueger, and there is no
small irony in the fact that their final victory comes from using a trick
learned in a fairy tale Heather had read to her son—Hansel and Gretel’s
ruse of pushing the wicked witch into the oven as she reaches after them.
The death of Freddy causes his entire hellish world to explode, but Heather
and Dylan find themselves propelled back into their “real world,” and as
the film closes, Heather begins reading to him from the now completed
script of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare—the blurring layers of mirrored
realities, of mise-en-abyme, collapsing into a perfectly irrational ending
in which the lead characters can read back through the script that had
dictated their preceding experiences.
Craven’s complex and shifting levels of reality reflect back upon his
practices as a filmmaker and provide a logical denouement to the Freddy
Krueger mythos. It also provides an interesting reflection on the place
of violent narratives in contemporary society—it is, after all, a violent
fairy tale that provides the strategy that helps Heather and Dylan escape
Krueger’s menace, and it is, in the mythological view of Craven himself,
the narratives about evil that help to contain it. As well, and on a more
mundane level, it seems clear that Craven’s answer to the vexing ques-
tion of violent media’s impact on children is to place the responsibility
for navigating such narratives with the parents, who, like Heather, must
rescue their own children.
As interesting as the formal implosions are, Craven’s New Nightmare
fails, in part because the “reality” does not feel “real.” Thus, the “bleeding”
of the film-within-the-film into the “real world” of the film lacks the kind
of ontological terror suggested by Egginton. In addition, Langenkamp’s

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realization that Freddy is actually bleeding into her world seems too easy,
and those around her are oddly willing to even entertain the idea. In the
end, Langenkamp’s “real life” is too aesthetically similar to the film and
the dream, and thus Craven is unable to create enough of a distinction
between the three worlds to make the blurring of them jarring.
Where New Nightmare offered the tantalizing, though ultimately
unrealized, possibilities of films slipping into our real world, Craven’s
next film would return to this ontological slippage from a different direc-
tion. Propelled by a superb script by Kevin Williamson, Craven’s 1996
Scream would not only become a major box office success and mark his
second return to prominence but also afford him a chance to revisit the
unhinged boundary between film and reality, though this time through
a story of people, as the tagline suggested, who had “taken their love of
scary movies too far.”
Scream opened the door for a brief period to what has been called the
“postmodern slasher,” a group of self-consciously constructed slasher
films often populated by attractive young actors from popular television
shows and filled with self-referential humor, cameos, and a generally
ironic tone.13 While many of these films—like I Know What You Did Last
Summer and Urban Legend—fail to blend their moments of terror with
their overall parodic tone, Craven’s Scream, as well as its two sequels,
effectively navigate the line between self-aware intertextuality and terror,
and at their heart is his use of the gothic sensibility that had served him
in Nightmare and New Nightmare. Where New Nightmare relies upon
the conceit that the actual fictional character could escape the bounds of
the cinematic frame and invade the reality of its stars, Scream retools this
idea and presents a world of media-savvy and media-saturated teenagers
who have framed their reality in terms of the cinematic mechanisms of
the slasher film.
The self-conscious framing of Scream within the cinematic conceits
of the slasher genre begins with the film’s opening murder sequence. An
homage both to Hitchcock’s early murder of Marion Crane in Psycho and
Carpenter’s opening murder sequence in Halloween, Craven’s Scream
begins with a blonde teenage female named Casey, played by Drew Bar-
rymore, receiving harassing phone calls while she prepares to watch a
scary movie. As the calls become threatening, the young woman learns
that the killer is holding her boyfriend, who is gagged and bound to a
chair on the back patio. The killer proposes a game—a series of trivia
questions about scary movies. Terrified and crying but with no other
choice, Casey plays along. When she misidentifies the killer in Friday the

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13th—answering Jason when the first film’s killer was his mother—the
killer murders her boyfriend before crashing into the house to pursue her.
After a chase, Casey flees toward the road as her parents return home,
but the killer catches her and murders her before hanging her from a tree
for her parents to find.
This opening scene establishes the overall tone of Scream—the blend
of humor and horror and a blurring of the lines between the trivial and
the deadly. Already the film has begun with a series of references to
other films, ranging from When a Stranger Calls (1979) to the original
Nightmare on Elm Street, and established the basic premise of the entire
picture—in order to survive, you must know the rules of the genre. Here
Craven utilizes an intertextual mise-en-abyme—a mirroring of the filmic
text within the texts of other films so that the entire enterprise becomes
a complicated pastiche of film references, including cameos from Linda
Blair (the young girl in The Exorcist [1973]) and even Wes Craven himself
as a janitor named Fred in a dirty red and green sweater.
The teenagers in Scream mirror precisely the young audience members
who were its primary audience in the late 1990s. They grew up on video-
tapes of older slasher films and were able to recite lines from classics like
Friday the 13th and Halloween. If New Nightmare was meant to inquire
into the broader social question of media’s influence on the young, then
Scream embodies the greatest fears of the media’s critics. Throughout
the film, almost all the primary characters display a staggering disregard
for their friends. As the film’s main teenage characters learn of the first
murder, most of them make wisecracks. Their immersion into the world
of film is so complete that Billy, protagonist Sidney’s erstwhile boyfriend
and, later we learn, one of two killers, insists that “it’s all a movie, all a
great big movie, only you can’t pick your genre.” The one exception here
is the inevitable “Final Girl,” Sidney. Indeed, in the end it is Sidney’s
refusal to succumb to the seductive implosion of film and reality that
ultimately saves her. Having survived the onslaught of what is actually
a pair of killers, Sidney stands with two of the remaining survivors over
the body of Billy. Randy, the virginal video store clerk who takes great
pains to clarify the “rules” of the genre throughout the film, explains to
Sidney and the audience, “This is the moment when the supposedly dead
killer comes back to life for one last scare.” But as the killer does suddenly
revive, Sidney shoots him in the head and proclaims, “Not in my movie.”
If there is a moral in this ending, it is in Sidney’s refusal of the cinematic
mechanisms that have sought to force her into particular positions and
instead the assertion of her agency to shape the reality around her.14

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In Scream, Craven reinvents the gothic form he had developed in both

Nightmare and New Nightmare. By focusing on the “bleeding” of the
cinematic framework outside the screen and into the realities of these
young people, he is able to avoid the major problem plaguing New Night-
mare, namely the need to make the “real” world within the film seem
real. Scream’s central conceit is that the cinematic framing of the world
has so bled into the reality of these young people that they cannot dis-
tinguish between film and reality, and in this regard, Sidney’s refusal of
this cinematic framework provides the film its moral center. Additionally,
the blurring of cinema and “reality” affords a unique kind of postmod-
ern pleasure as the audience is called upon to “play along” and spot the
various points of intertextual blurring. The speed of these often offhand
intertextual references allows audience members “in the know” to enjoy
the moment of recognition, but it also allows those who don’t catch the
“joke” to continue their enjoyment of the broader plot. As an example,
during the opening sequence, Casey discusses Freddy Krueger with her
mysterious caller and notes that the “first one was [scary] but the rest
sucked”—an inside joke referring to Craven’s directorial involvement
in only the first of the Elm Street series but not its next five sequels. In
another scene, a character refers to horror films by “Wes Carpenter,” a
humorous blurring of Wes Craven and John Carpenter. These brief asides
provide a kind of “trivial pursuit” for viewers but do not hinder the prog-
ress of the film’s narrative.
Importantly, Scream also uses the “reality bleeding” motif to enhance
its horror. The teenage audience for Scream had become familiar with the
standard formula of the slasher movie, to the point of being jaded, and
so Craven’s film offers a simple challenge—will knowing the rules allow
you to survive? Or, for the audience more directly, will knowing these
rules help you avoid being frightened? The challenge for Craven, thus,
is to employ the now-transparent rules in ways that still evoke screams
from his audience, and in Scream he succeeds.
Part of the fright in Scream is derived from elements of the other two
gothic dimensions from Craven’s earlier films, namely the gothic body and
the gothic house. While not immersed within the dreamlike unreality of
Nightmare, the bodies in Scream, especially those of what we later learn
are two killers wearing identical costumes, take enormous amounts of
almost comedic damage. They are kicked, punched, hit in the head by beer
bottles, and thrown down stairs. In one scene near the film’s finale, the
two killers even engage in acts of mutual mutilation as part of their plan
to frame Sidney’s father as the killer and themselves as surviving victims.

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In a way similar to Freddy’s body—albeit not as fantastic—their bodies

have become canvases upon which their spectacular violence is inscribed.
The houses in Scream also resemble those of Craven’s earlier films.
These are even more affluent homes located in remote areas that provide
both privacy and isolation. It is telling that Craven’s motif of “chases
through houses” also operates in Scream. Sidney comments on this ten-
dency in the horror films she finds generally distasteful in her first phone
conversation with the killer. Believing the caller to be Randy playing a
prank, she insists that she doesn’t care for horror movies because they
all feature “big-breasted bimbos” who are “always running up the stairs
when she should be going out the front door.” Moments later, when the
killer does burst in on her, Sidney finds her attempt to escape out the
door blocked by the chain, and she instead must run up the stairs. It is
interesting in this regard that both times Sidney must flee the killer in
extended cat-and-mouse chases through a house, she goes upward. In
her second flight from the killer(s), Sidney is in the home of Stu—whom
we later learn is Billy’s obedient, murderous partner—and she evades the
killers by heading up into the attic before finally being forced to leap from
the attic window, miraculously landing on a large boat tarp and escaping
serious injury. Craven’s architectural logic remains consistent—Nancy
had to descend into the subterranean levels to draw Freddy out and then
lead him up onto the main floors, and Sidney flees her attackers by push-
ing ever upward to the second floor and then up into the house’s attic. In
both cases, the flight is away from the madness below.
True to the genre, which it both enacts and parodies, Scream estab-
lished a franchise, and in the two subsequent films, Craven continues
the work of deconstructing the genre through the use of gothic form
and intertextual mise-en-abyme. Scream 2 (1997) finds Sidney and Randy,
the other survivor, attending college amid the media frenzy created by
a movie version of the events from the first film. Scream 2 opens with
an African American couple attending the premiere of Stab, the film-
within-the-film that is, essentially, a “fictionalized” version of the “real”
events in Scream. The complicated interplay here also serves as a space for
reflection. During the opening scene, the woman complains that horror
films rarely feature African Americans and, echoing Sidney’s complaints
in the first film, that they are mindless and demeaning. Soon, however,
she is engrossed in the movie and fails to notice that the person who
returns in her boyfriend’s clothing and donning a “Scream mask” is not
actually her boyfriend—whom we saw murdered in a theater bathroom
stall earlier. The killer slashes her throat, and in a startling moment of

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Craven’s use of mise-en-abyme, she staggers to the front of the auditorium

as the audience cheers and throws popcorn. Slowly the audience realizes
that this is not a publicity stunt or an imaginative fan but a real murder.
She gasps for her final breath in front of the projection screen on which
the first murder from Scream is being reenacted.
The clever blending of spectacular mediated violence with “real” vio-
lence utilized in this opening sequence mirrors a similar scene in Scream.
As Randy watches a video of John Carpenter’s Halloween, we see the
killer appear behind him. As the menacing figure approaches, Randy,
played by well-known actor Jamie Kennedy, cries out, “Look behind you,
Jamie!” referring to actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays the “Final Girl”
in Halloween. The implosion of filmic violence with the “real” moment of
violence plays out even more dramatically in the opening of Scream 2, and
it is worth noting that by positioning the opening murders within a movie
theater, Craven adds to both the fright and the complexity of his mise-en-
abyme by focusing attention on the position of the audience. At one level,
the likely audience for Scream 2 would be watching the film in a movie
theater not unlike the one depicted in the film, thus working to break
through the obvious barrier that separates filmic violence—contained by
the screen—and the audience, seemingly safe in the confines of the “real”
theater. At another level, especially as this scene reaches its conclusion
with the woman dying in front of the perplexed audience members, the
strange mirroring Craven has developed positions the audience as the
center of attention, thus forcing the viewing audience to essentially view
itself. Put in this position, we are called to reflect upon our own viewing
habits and the strange fascination that draws us to watch fictional depic-
tions of violent acts while being repelled by real violence in our midst.
The expansion of this mirroring twist continues throughout Scream
2. The plot parallels in large part that of the first film. Randy explains to
Deputy Dewey, another survivor of the first Scream, that they are in a
sequel and that certain rules apply, including a higher body count and
more gratuitous deaths. He also insists that everyone is a suspect. The
surviving principals from the first film—Sidney, Randy, Dewey, reporter
Gale Weathers—soon gather, and the mystery of the killer’s identity grows
more complex. The murders continue across the tight-knit college campus
as the killer once again pursues Sidney, killing Randy along the way, until
it is finally revealed that there are, once again, two killers: film student
Mickey, who hoped to achieve media immortality in the subsequent trial,
and the mastermind behind the murders, Mrs. Loomis, the mother of
Billy, the main killer in the first film. The film concludes, as in the first

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one, with an extended chase—this time through a college theater set—and

a confrontation between Sidney and her two stalkers.
The character of Mickey, while generally undeveloped, does provide
another opportunity for Craven to reflect upon the ongoing debate about
media violence. Not only is Mickey a film student—perhaps a subtle dig
at the kinds of academic critics who have for the most part downplayed
Craven’s films—but his ultimate motive is to become a media celebrity, à
la Charles Manson, and, more to the point, to defend himself in court by
blaming the media. “I’ve got my whole defense planned out. I’m going to
blame the movies. . . . These days it’s all about the trial. Can’t you see it:
‘The effects of cinema violence on society.’ I’ll get Dershowitz or Cochran
to represent me, Bob Dole on the witness stand in my defense. Hell, the
Christian Coalition will pay my legal fees,” he proclaims. Dole, it is worth
recalling, had made the condemnation of media violence a major part of
his “culture wars” platform in the 2004 presidential election. In the end,
Mickey becomes a victim—an ironic end for a killer who intended to claim
he was a victim of violent movies—murdered by Mrs. Loomis, who wants
to clean up the loose ends. Mrs. Loomis’s motivation is more basic—she
wants to kill Sidney as revenge for the death of her son in the first film.
The other notable aspect of the film’s ending is the development of
Sidney. At the end of Scream, she had taken control of her “movie” and
asserted her agency to refuse the generic parameters of the film in which
she found herself. In Scream 2, we learn that she has become a drama
major and is preparing for the starring role of Cassandra in Lysistrata.
There is no small irony in the fact that she plays Cassandra, the Greek
heroine blessed with the ability to foresee the future yet cursed to have
no one believe her—a fate Sidney also suffers throughout Scream 2. The
final confrontation between Sidney and the two killers, as noted, takes
place on the theatrical set of Lysistrata, and she overcomes the murderous
Mrs. Loomis by utilizing the theatrical effects—falling blocks, thunder
and lightning effects, and the like—to disorient the killer. If, at the end of
Scream, Sidney was able to assert her agency within the textual world of
the genre, in Scream 2 she bends the very artifice of the theatrical setting
to her will to allow her to once again survive.
Sidney’s survival in Scream 2 sets the stage for her return in Scream
3.15 Undoubtedly the inferior entry into this series, Scream 3 suffered both
from a tired and stale conceit and a weaker script penned by Ehren Kruger
instead of Kevin Williamson. But the film does take Craven’s mise-en-
abyme to what can be thought of as its logical conclusion. At the outset
of Scream 3, Sidney has withdrawn into a secluded and secret life while

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the film franchise of Stab is being rebooted with Stab 3: Return to Wood-
sboro and a cast of actors is preparing to portray the characters from the
earlier films. A killer begins murdering people who knew Sidney with the
hopes of drawing her out, and eventually the carnage does bring her out
of hiding and to Hollywood where the familiar game of stalk-and-slash
gets played out. The bulk of the film follows true to the formula, though
in an even more exaggerated way with cameos from Carrie Fisher, playing
an archivist who looks amazingly like Carrie Fisher, and from the Kevin
Smith creations Jay and Silent Bob. Randy reappears in a video he had
the foresight to make before his death in Scream 2 to share the rules of
the “trilogy,” namely that secrets from the past will resurface and that
the killer will be superhuman and seemingly indestructible. Both these
predictions, of course, turn out to be true. In Scream 3, we learn that the
death of Sidney’s mother—which serves as the catalyst for the series of
films—was orchestrated by her “secret” son, the result of a sexual assault
during her teenage days seeking fame in Hollywood. Her shunning of this
illegitimate son led him—a would-be director named Roman Bridger—
to convince Billy and Stu to commit the first murders. Added to this
convoluted rewriting of the narrative history is Roman’s seeming invin-
cibility—a gesture to the gothic body—as he sustains several gunshots
without being slowed down, effected apparently by his decision to wear
a bulletproof vest. The film ends with Sidney squaring off with Roman in
the same Hollywood mansion where her mother was assaulted, though
at the end of this film it is Deputy Dewey who kills Roman.
While the plotting and dialogue in Scream 3 beg credulity, Craven’s
mirroring motif once again expands. Scream 3 is, for instance, the only
entry into the series that contains dream sequences. Sidney dreams of
her dead mother returning to haunt her, and somehow the killer seems
aware of these dreams and utilizes some fantastic technological device
that allows him to mimic the mother’s voice exactly. This device is used
throughout the film—an imaginative if unlikely extension of the voice
modulator that masked the killer’s voices in the earlier films—and adds to
the general sense that no one is whom they seem to be. The mise-en-abyme
in Scream 3 becomes even more accentuated by the fact that much of the
film takes place in and around the set of Stab 3, which seems to be a kind
of remake of Scream. In perhaps the most inventive sequence in the film,
Sidney is lured onto the soundstage for Stab 3, where she finds herself in
a replica of the Woodsboro homes—hers and Stu’s—that were the setting
of the most dramatic sequences in Scream. Not surprisingly, the killer
appears, and we find Sidney recreating her evasions from the first film

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on the set. Of course, the houses used for filming are not complete, and
in what might be read as a commentary on the filmmaking process, in
one telling moment Sidney seeks to run into a second-story room and
finds herself dangling in thin air from the incomplete set-house. Here
the gothic house is revealed in some ways for what it is—an incomplete
illusion of home filled with imagined proportions that in the end can
provide no genuine comfort or safety.
Given the overwhelming gothic sensibility at work in his films, it is
odd that Craven’s attempts to engage traditional, supernatural gothic
storylines have proven disappointing. His most recent effort in this regard
was his 2005 take on the werewolf story in Cursed. Reteaming with writer
Kevin Williamson, Craven relocates the traditional werewolf tale to Los
Angeles, where a brother and sister, Jimmy and Ellie, become infected
after a werewolf attack. Like Scream, the film is replete with snappy dia-
logue and pop culture references—Ellie is a production assistant on The
Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn affording cameos by Kilborn, actor
Scott Baio, and others. Craven’s typical gothic aspects are clearly evident
here: the transformation of the werewolves clearly involves the gothic
body as the human form stretches and twists to become lupine. While
there is not as clear an interest in a particular gothic house, one of the
important conflicts between the brother and sister duo and the attacking
werewolf takes place in a Hollywood club decorated along the lines of
horror films. At one point, the protagonists hide from a werewolf behind
a wax statue of Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman from the 1941 film, and another
sequence involves a chase through a hall of mirrors. There is also some
gesture to the line between reality and fantasy in Cursed. Jimmy, who got
a look at the creature during the attack, is convinced that it was a were-
wolf and begins researching the topic in various books. As he attempts
to convince his reluctant sister, she brushes off his evidence by asserting
that his “facts” are all fiction. “The line between fact and fiction has always
been a thin one,” Jimmy responds. The gothic question of the bleeding
between fiction and reality, however, remains little explored, and the film
for the most part follows a predictable series of twists. Not surprisingly,
Cursed was generally received poorly by both audiences and critics.16
Craven’s earlier attempt at a traditional gothic monster tale also missed
the mark, although it does incorporate one of Craven’s other notable
tendencies, namely a sustained effort to incorporate African American
characters into the horror genre. Vampire in Brooklyn, released in 1995,
recasts much of the traditional Bram Stoker tale of Dracula into the Afri-
can American community in Brooklyn.17 Starring Eddie Murphy and

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Angela Bassett, the film follows the efforts of a Caribbean vampire named
Maximillian (Murphy) as he seeks a female descendant of the vampire line
to ensure his survival. Maximillian locates his target, a police detective
named Rita, played by Angela Bassett, and begins an effort to separate her
from her lover and seduce her. The effort fails, and in the end Maximillian
is staked by Rita, whereupon he disintegrates. Ultimately, Vampire is an
uneven mix of Eddie Murphy–fueled irreverent comedy and a supposedly
serious seduction of Rita with a few graphic moments of horror added in
to keep the generic overtones.
The film does, however, contain aspects of the gothic form of interest
here. Perhaps most dramatically evident is the gothic body employed
through makeup and the talents of Murphy. Maximillian, we learn, has
the ability to shape-shift into other human forms and does so in two
comedic sequences. In one, he takes the form of a fire-and-brimstone
Baptist preacher whom Rita comes to for advice. As he seeks to bring the
woman closer into his embrace, thanks to his disguise, he is suddenly
swept toward the church to perform a sermon. Unable to enter the hal-
lowed ground of the church, he leads the congregation outside, where he
delivers a humorously over-the-top sermon proclaiming, “Evil is good.”
A similar effect is used when Maximillian takes the form of an Italian
mobster named Guido in order to be arrested by Rita and learn more
about her. As these and other strange events occur, Rita is plagued by
nightmares and visions and begins to doubt her own sanity. In this way,
Vampire also plays out the gothic form of insanity along the line between
nocturnal and diurnal.
Craven’s use of the gothic form is a consistent tendency in his body of
work, and with only a few exceptions—his 1999 biopic Music of the Heart,
for example—every film Craven has directed utilizes some dimensions
of the gothic form discussed above. In the remaining chapters of this
section, I continue to note the use of the gothic form but attend more
closely to the ways this gothic sensibility intersects with other issues,
namely technology and the family.

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 5
Gothic Technologies: The Serpent and the Rainbow,
Deadly Friend, Swamp Thing, Red Eye, Shocker

The films considered in the previous chapter reveal Wes Craven’s deep
indebtedness to Bram Stoker and the gothic form embodied in Dracula.
Clearly, Maximillian is a revised version of Dracula, but in a way so is
Krueger, a creature of the supernatural who intervenes in our rational
world to spread chaos and fear and, in essence, feed upon the living.
Craven also owes a debt to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, especially in
its exploration of the intersection of the world of the fantastic and the
scientific technologies that dominate modern life. The films considered
in this chapter reveal much about Craven’s interest in what I would call
gothic technologies.
Gothic fiction arose during the period of the late eighteenth century
known as the Enlightenment, and it seems clear that the popularity of
these tales of the supernatural owes something to their ability to contrast
and undermine the rising sense of scientific rationality. Markman Ellis
notes, “The scientific enlightenment reflected a profound cultural trans-
formation, in its belief in the power of human enquiry to solve the prob-
lems of existence and its rejection of received ideas of orthodox religion.”1
Accompanying this rise in scientific rationality was a concomitant rise in
democratic revolutions and an expansion of technological capacity. Peter
Otto contends, “Gothic fiction registered the anxieties and vulnerabilities,
along with the hopes, of a culture in upheaval from the American and
French Revolutions, as well as the Industrial Revolution.”2 Gothic nov-
els, with their tales of ghosts, spirits, and creatures of the night, offered

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a counterpoint to the rise of scientific/technological reasoning and, in

their own way, a kind of reassurance that whatever the scope of science,
there might always be dark corners it could not illuminate. For novelists
like Shelley, the gothic tradition would provide a platform for considering
the limits of science and technology and the horrible consequences when
those limits are transgressed.
A fairly straightforward example of the “science versus the super-
natural” motif in Craven’s films comes in his 1988 Serpent and the Rain-
bow, a kind of retooling of ground covered in the 1932 Bela Lugosi film
White Zombie. The film is loosely based on the memoirs of ethnobotanist
Wade Davis and his real-life efforts to discover the drug responsible for
reported Haitian zombies—the opening credits call it “inspired by true
events.” In the film version, the ethnobotanist is Dr. Dennis Alan, a
fearless adventurer who travels the globe to secure mysterious potions
and herbs. Some of the film’s earlier moments deal with Alan’s dismissal
of the purported supernatural dimensions of voodoo and the zombie
drug, but relatively quickly Craven’s film pushes deep into the realm of
the supernatural: indeed, the film’s final act is filled with mystical spirits
and magically animated moving objects, and ultimately, the villain is
pulled down into hell.
Many of the gothic motifs in Craven’s other films are evident in Ser-
pent. Numerous gothic bodies are on display as various corpses become
reanimated, including a small female corpse that appears to be dressed
in a wedding veil and whose mouth stretches out to unnatural propor-
tions before a snake comes flying out of it. Perhaps the most interesting
gothic body in the film is that of the protagonist, Dennis Alan, played by
Bill Pullman. Throughout the film, Alan has been pursuing the zombie
formula under the watchful and harassing eye of the Tonton Macoute—a
paramilitary group under the direction of the voodoo witch doctor who
is the film’s main villain. At the beginning of the film’s third act, Alan
himself is sprayed with the zombie powder and “dies.” We see through
Alan’s evidently dead eyes as the villainous voodoo leader explains that
he isn’t dead and will be aware of every moment of his burial. Perhaps the
most effective and intriguing moments in the film are when the camera
assumes Alan’s point of view during his medical examination and burial:
his windowed coffin is lowered into the earth and dirt is shoveled onto
it. The screen goes black for a long moment before the paralysis is finally
broken, and Alan begins to scream in the blackness of his coffin. This
brief scene, in which we are made to assume Alan’s point of view and are
forced to reconcile ourselves to the utter darkness of his final descent into

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the nocturnal world, is a precursor to the kinds of audience experiments

Craven would take up in the Scream films. Here we have, perhaps, the
clearest illustration of the failure of scientific enlightenment to overcome
the nocturnal forces of the supernatural, and in these moments we and
Alan are utterly contained within the darkness of the coffin.
But the ambivalent and unsettling passage into the nocturnal is too
short-lived, and within only a few seconds our discomfort is relieved as
we move aboveground to see one of the “zombies” arrive to dig the pro-
tagonist up. The moment in the coffin effects our full movement into the
otherworldly realm of the nocturnal, and the rescuing zombie explains
that the dead “can see things the living cannot see.” Sure enough, Alan
finds himself able to see the mysterious spirits and manifestations of
voodoo as he races to save his love interest in the midst of the political
and social collapse of Haiti. He confronts the villainous voodoo leader
and defeats him, thanks to help from the various captured souls he is
able to release. Finally defeated, the villain is pulled down into hell, and
Alan’s girlfriend declares that “the nightmare is over.” As in the traditional
gothic form, Serpent requires the highly rational Dr. Alan to overcome
his belief that the diurnal world is the only world and, instead, embrace
the possibility of the nocturnal world of magic and lurking evil.
A final interesting observation about Serpent is its place in Craven’s
long-standing effort to expand the horror genre to include people of color.
This concern is also manifested in the opening scenes of Scream 2 during
explicit dialogue between the African American couple who will become
the first victims. It is also evident in Vampire in Brooklyn, where the
predominantly African American cast creates a new ethnic vision of the
vampire, and in one of the films I turn to in the next chapter, The People
under the Stairs.
In this chapter, I want to linger at the intersection of science and the
supernatural in some of Craven’s films. Deadly Friend (1986), the film
most indebted to Shelley’s Frankenstein, is based on the novel Friend by
Diana Henstell and, as with Shelley’s novel, revolves around efforts at
reanimation. Here it is the work of teenage scientific genius Paul who uses
his robotic and cybernetic knowledge to return his love interest, Saman-
tha, to life. The general plot of the film follows Paul as he arrives in a new
town to take a prestigious fellowship at a university to study neurology
and add this to his work on artificial intelligence. Paul is accompanied
by his mother and his remarkably intelligent robot named “BB.” Paul and
BB soon befriend another awkward teenager, Tom, and his attractive
next-door neighbor, Samantha. The trio—or quartet with BB—rapidly

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develop close bonds, and it seems that Paul and Samantha are beginning
a romance when dark events transpire. Samantha’s abusive, alcoholic
father attacks her as she returns home one evening and pushes her down
the stairs, where she receives a fatal brain injury. As the doctors prepare
to take Samantha off life support, Paul and Tom conspire to rescue her
by implanting the neural chip from BB, who had been destroyed by an
angry neighbor after a childish prank. Before their efforts come to frui-
tion, Samantha is taken off life support, but, undaunted, Paul decides to
steal her corpse and then implants the chip. The effort at reanimation
is successful, but the revived girl is more demented robot than human
being, and she soon takes out revenge on her father, luring him into the
basement where she burns him and then chokes him to death. She also
kills the old woman who had destroyed the robot, BB. The two murders
suggest that the reanimated corpse is both Samantha and BB, a notion
reinforced later in the film as at times we see things in the pixilated
form of the robot and then in the clear vision of the human girl. In the
end, however, the murders prove too much for the two boys, and Tom
decides to reveal their conspiracy. Paul and Tom fight, and in the melee
Samantha/BB escapes. After an extended police chase, an officer shoots
and kills the girl/robot—just as she is beginning to regain her human
consciousness. The film ends with Paul sneaking into the coroner’s office
to view the corpse and the sudden reanimation of Samantha/BB. As the
girl/robot grasps Paul, the metallic body of the robot, now with a demonic
grin on its metal face, rips through her skin and the film ends, although
it is unclear whether this final moment is happening or is another in a
series of “dream shocks” that pervade the film.
As with the previously considered Craven films, Deadly Friend is
replete with gothic motifs, including sequences in which a horrifying
event occurs and is only later revealed to be a dream. While houses are
not quite as prevalent here, it is notable that Samantha/BB lures her father
down into the basement before killing him as revenge for his years of
abuse. It is also interesting that the two definite dream shock sequences
involve this dead father. While still alive, Samantha dreams of her father
entering her bedroom and threatening her—with a strong implication
of sexual abuse—before she stabs him with a broken vase. In the dream,
the father simply laughs at the assault, and the girl suddenly awakens.
Later, after the girl/robot has murdered the abusive father, it is Paul who
dreams of the father’s charred corpse entering his bedroom. Both night-
mares focus on the abusive father, and it is in the basement—that space
of secrets and tragedy—that he meets his end.

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The reanimated Sam kills her father in the basement of their home in
Craven’s Deadly Friend. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).
The transformation of Samantha’s body occurs at the intersection of
the gothic and technology that is prominent in several of Craven’s films.
The crucial element in Deadly Friend is not only Samantha’s return from
the dead but also Paul’s use of technology to effect this reanimation. It is
never entirely clear why the fusion of robot and human creates a murder-
ous entity focused on revenge, nor is it explained why the introduction
of a robotic chip into the dead brain of Samantha would give her the
strength to overcome her father or throw another young hoodlum several
yards into the window of a police car, but it is clear that the technologi-
cal innovation that allowed Paul to create BB and later to introduce the
artificial intelligence from his robot to his young friend is a dangerous
blurring of the line between technology and humanity.
The monster as hybrid is deeply situated within our cultural conscious-
ness. Noel Carroll, for instance, defines the genre of horror precisely
around the figure of monsters, which are beings “un-natural relative to a
culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they
violate it.”3 In gothic fiction, the figure of the monster represents the central
crime against which the plot is directed, or, as Judith Halberstam puts it,
“in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form—the
monster—that announces itself (demonstrates) as the place of corruption.”4

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In Craven’s Deadly Friend, it is the hybrid figure of Sam/BB who embodies

the corruption of the film’s plot—corruption of both repressed traumas of
abuse and the categorical violation of human and machine.
Anxiety about expanding computer technology and the potential dan-
gers of machines with artificial intelligence was common in the cinema
of the early 1980s.5 War Games (1983) had portrayed an out-of-control
military computer bent on winning a war game by launching real mis-
siles, and a similar theme was woven into the time-traveling action film
Terminator (1984), in which a self-aware computer system declares war on
all humans. Fear of intelligent technology has numerous precedents—like
the malevolent robot who stalks Kirk Douglas and Farah Fawcett in the
1980 sci-fi film Saturn 3—and in some ways, the modern source of much
of this filmic anxiety lies with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic 2001, in which
the space station computer HAL becomes a menacing figure. Deadly
Friend follows this trend by revamping the Frankenstein story through
the introduction of advanced computer technology.
Yet, even in light of the broader cultural anxiety about technological
expansion, what is initially unclear within the narrative of Deadly Friend
is why the fusion of the generally benevolent robot BB and the good
Samantha would yield a monster. Two clues are evident in the film. First,
from the opening moments, it is clear that BB is not a purely innocu-
ous entity. While much of the first act of the film shows the robot as a
somewhat bumbling sidekick to the trio of young friends, he does demon-
strate an ability for violence—as when he picks up a local bully who was
harassing Paul.6 His potential for violence is also revealed in the film’s
opening moments. Paul and his mother have stopped at a gas station on
their way to their new home when a man breaks into their car. As the
thief looks into the backseat, he is confronted by the electronic arm of BB,
who grabs him by the throat, releasing him only as Paul and his mother
return. Thus, it is clear even before his fusion with Samantha that BB has
no conscience or sense of moral limitations. Added to this is Samantha’s
own troubled past. That she is an abused child is made abundantly clear
throughout the film, and the likelihood of sexual abuse is reinforced by
the disturbing dream sequence during which her father menaces her in
her bed and in a later scene where she wedges a chair against her bedroom
door in an effort to keep him at bay. The nature of this fusion between
amoral robot and troubled girl is made clearer in the two murders. In
both instances, the gothic notion of crimes of the past returning to haunt
holds true. The fused Samantha/BB employs the two sides of its entity:
the technological lack of compassion or moral restrictions and the very

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human capacity to retain memories of past injustices. As with dreams, in

Craven’s films technology becomes another mechanism through which
our dark memories and fantasies slip into our reality.
A similar concern for the fusing of humanity and technology is evident
in Craven’s low-budget and campy comic book adaptation Swamp Thing
(1982). In this film, Dr. Alec Holland is developing new genetic strands of
plants in a secret government facility deep in the swamps. His research is
sought by a villain named Arcane, and soon Arcane’s men infiltrate the
lab, kill Holland’s sister, and throw him into the swamp along with his
newly discovered formula. Holland mutates, returns as the titular Swamp
Thing, and rescues his new love interest from Arcane’s men. After a series
of chases and conflict, Arcane decides to take the formula himself in
the hopes of becoming a superhuman being but instead transforms into
something resembling a human boar. Arcane and Swamp Thing have a
final conflict in the swamps before the villain is vanquished, and Swamp
Thing joins his new love in the heart of the swamps.
While clearly a minor film in Craven’s oeuvre, Swamp Thing does fol-
low the broader themes in his work. The comic book aesthetic employed
by the film is an interesting example of the bleeding of one type of nar-
rative form into another. Craven employs several visual techniques of
the comic book genre, including the use of wipes to transition between
major scenes in the film. The swamp is also a decidedly gothic space in
which dark secrets—here, the murder of Holland’s sister and his human
body—resurface. But, of most interest here is the exploration of a theme
that is picked up again in Serpent and the Rainbow, namely the limits of
scientific inquiry. Whereas in Serpent, the emphasis would be on sci-
ence’s dangerous efforts to pierce the veil of the supernatural, in Swamp
Thing it is science’s careless intervention into the natural order of things
that creates the danger. Holland is clearly a reckless scientist, but he also
has a reverence for the natural world in which he works. “There is much
beauty in the swamp,” he explains to his paramour. Arcane, on the other
hand, sees both science and nature as merely instruments in his hands.
The formula Holland stumbles onto creates what can be read as a
gothic body, one unbound by natural laws because it exists in the space
between diurnal and nocturnal worlds. For Holland, the body is a fusion
with the swamp—the titular Swamp Thing—and he proves both strong
and heroic although also disfigured in his green and slimy husk. When
Arcane manages to recreate the formula, he tests it on one of his hulking
henchmen, only to find the large man transformed into a shrunken and rat-
like creature. When he questions Holland/Swamp Thing about this result,

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the monstrous scientist explains that the formula enhances a person’s

essence, and since the henchman was a small-minded person, he shrunk
rather than grew in stature. Believing that his massive intellect would give
him similar physical powers, the evil Arcane drinks the potion only to be
transformed into a large but monstrous boar-like creature. In the end, a
relatively predictable battle between Arcane/Boar and Holland/Swamp
Thing takes place in the swamp with Holland victorious and Arcane killed.
At the heart of the gothic body in Swamp Thing, however, is an idea
that also informs Serpent and the Rainbow and Deadly Friend, namely
the danger inherent in relying on scientific inquiry to protect one’s self
from the consequences of crossing boundaries. The gothic perils associ-
ated with scientific inquiry have deep roots in the literary tradition and
represent a strong cultural fear of science going too far. As Fred Botting
observes in relation to gothic literature, “The lingering dark Romanticism
that surrounded accounts of scientific or individual excess was both a
threat to social mores and a sign that, in the increasingly normalized and
rationalized worlds of family and commerce, there was something miss-
ing.”7 In these three Craven films, what is shown to be missing is both
attention to the normal limits of morality and a healthy respect for the
unknown. In each case, crossing the boundary between the worlds of the
known and unknown—the central premise of gothic work—unleashes
unexpected and often horrific consequences.8 Interestingly, in Serpent
and the Rainbow and Swamp Thing, the plots are resolved through the
forging of a union between the diurnal world of science and the nocturnal
forces of the supernatural—and in both cases, these unions are forged in
the physical bodies of the scientist protagonists. Dr. Alan’s embodiment
of magical powers allows him to overcome the forces of the evil voodoo
leader, and Dr. Holland’s transformation into the hybrid Swamp Creature
allows him to ward off the predatory scientific advances of Arcane. It is
the traumatic context of Deadly Friend that leads its conclusion to tragedy
instead of triumph, and the creation of the unnatural Sam/BB hybrid leads
only to more trauma visited upon Paul in the nightmare that ends the film.
In Craven’s films, science has a unique relationship to the nocturnal
world of dangerous spirits and events, but so too do the basic tools of
technology. Even in the films already considered, elementary technologi-
cal devices prove either threatening or dangerously unreliable. This is
particularly true of communication technology, which, in theory, ought
to render us safer and more connected to the rational structures of the
world. In Craven’s films, however, the tools of communication not only
offer few comforts but serve as portals for new dangers. Evil spirits reach
out through these technological means, and the technologies that are

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meant to protect and secure us are turned against us. The notion of tech-
nology as a doorway for the supernatural has gained some prominence in
popular culture, ushered in partly by films like Craven’s, and Maria Beville
contends, “The advancement of technology in a postmodern culture that is
pervaded by fear, therefore, can be recognized as posing new potential for
uncanny experiences and for the idea of the ghost in Gothic literature.”9
Consider, for example, the telephone. In Craven’s films, the telephone
not only fails to provide safety but becomes a tool for the threatening
nocturnal world. Casey’s telephone in the opening sequence of Scream
links her to the homicidal maniacs who use it to torment her. A similar
scene occurs in Scream 2, when Randy also receives a threatening call.
As he and his compatriots try to find the killer in a large open park, it
is Randy who continues talking to him until stumbling too close to the
van in which he is hiding, becoming the killer’s next victim. In Scream 3,
the killer uses both the real-world technology of the cell phone and the
imaginary technology of a voice modulator to deceive his victims and lure
them to their deaths, and the log of calls on a cell phone is also used to
track down the reclusive Sidney. Additionally, in both Nightmare on Elm
Street and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the telephone becomes a conduit
not only for Freddy’s threatening voice but also for his supernaturally
manifested mouth, which appears as part of the receiver.

Gothic technologies pose dangers in Craven’s films, as Heather learns

when Freddy possesses her phone in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Courtesy
of British Film Institute (BFI).

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 Gothic Dimensions in the Films of Wes Craven

Craven’s 2005 thriller Red Eye reinforces the danger of communication

technology. In the film, luxury hotel manager Lisa is returning home on a
red-eye flight when she finds herself terrorized by a professional criminal
whose men have taken her father hostage. In exchange for his release, Lisa
is forced to call her hotel—using the air-phone—and have the secretary
of Homeland Security moved to a new room where he will be vulnerable
to an assassination attempt. The film’s gripping second act takes place
largely in the confined and claustrophobic space of the aircraft as the killer
seeks to coerce Lisa into making the call and she tries to find ways to
stall. In one sequence, she finally begins the call before the connection is
interrupted by inclement weather, beginning the process of psychological
cat-and-mouse all over again. Lisa does finally make the fatal call, but she
is able to slip away from her captor after landing and use her cell phone
to make a second call just in time to save the secretary and his family; she
then speeds to her father’s house where she eludes and overcomes both
the hired assassin and her initial tormentor. Interestingly, this sequence
takes place in an extended chase throughout her father’s house, which is
under construction and, in a Craven signature, involves traveling up and
down stairs, into and out of locked rooms, and around circular hallways.
In Red Eye, as with Craven’s other films, the telephone provides the
chief means of safety—as she alerts the authorities with her second call—
but also one of the primary conduits of danger. The technology of com-
munication, in this way, simultaneously brings its users closer together
while pushing them farther apart. Linda Bauer-Berenbaum observes a
similar tendency in the depiction of communication technology in gothic
literature, noting that “beneath the obvious benefits of technology lurk
the threats of depersonalization.”10 This depersonalization seems clear in
Craven’s earlier works—the menacing phone calls in the Scream series
and Nightmare films—and in Red Eye, Lisa is forced to use this commu-
nication technology to reach out and endanger innocent people.
Telephones are not the only offending technologies in Craven’s films,
and particular danger comes in the form of the television. Dylan watches
the televised version of the original Nightmare in the early stages of New
Nightmare, and in spite of Heather’s objections, the earlier version con-
tinues to mysteriously appear on the screen. In the original Nightmare,
Glen falls asleep while watching the television and is then pulled, along
with the TV, through the bed to his death. In Scream, the lackey Stu is
finally killed by Sidney when she pushes a television—playing the film
Halloween—onto his head, a poetic ending for a young man whose sense
of reality had been so warped by scary movies.

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The terror of unleashed technology is most evident in Shocker, Craven’s

1989 effort to create a new Freddy Krueger. The film revolves around
Horace Pinker, a television repairman and serial killer, and the efforts of
Jonathan, a young college football player and son of the police chief, to
catch him. Pinker’s lair, in his repair shop, is filled with walls of televi-
sions all screening gruesome scenes of mob violence and animal cruelty,
and they give some sense of his disturbed inner mind. Pinker’s murders
are experienced by Jonathan through dreams, and we later learn that he
is actually Pinker’s son, given up for adoption when Pinker murdered
his wife. The killer is caught near the end of the film’s first act and then
executed. However, before being led to the electric chair, Pinker is seen
connected to his cell’s television and conducting a strange ritual that
eventually causes a mysterious smoky being to emanate from the TV
set and grant him his wish. After he is electrocuted, Pinker becomes a
being of electricity, able to possess people and travel through electrical
and telephone lines and even enter into the television airwaves.
This transformation allows Pinker to become a gothic body akin to
Freddy Krueger, unbound by natural laws, but it also sets up one of the
more revealing scenes in the film. Utilizing a magical charm bestowed
upon him by his slain girlfriend’s spirit, Jonathan manages to follow
Pinker into the television, and there begins a cartoonish, professional
wrestling–style fight between the two as they pass through various TV
channels. The two fight through footage from World War II, through tele-
vision news reports of riots, through a boxing match, through footage of
an atomic bomb test—Pinker’s head becoming the enormous mushroom
cloud—into the living room of an overweight family, across the desk of a
news anchor reporting on the strange disturbance in television reception,
and even onto the set of a televangelist, played by Timothy Leary. Even-
tually, Jonathan tricks Pinker into materializing in a room where a TV
camera is broadcasting live. Pinker suddenly appears as a televised image
in the space in which he is televised—his broadcasted image mirrored
endlessly into the screen behind him. At this point, Pinker is trapped in
his own self-referential, televisual world, and Jonathan utilizes a hidden
remote control to take control of Pinker’s televised body—an interesting
use of mise-en-abyme. In the end, Pinker is trapped in the televisual world
he had exploited: Jonathan’s friends arrange to blow the town’s power sup-
ply, thereby trapping Pinker forever. Pinker seeks to escape the television
trap by leaping through a TV set, but Jonathan pulls the plug and Pinker
simply smashes his head into the set. The film ends with Jonathan nar-
rowly escaping the televisual abyss and emerging through an exploding

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TV set. As the fire dies, Pinker curses him from the sputtering flames,
but his end comes as Jonathan simply turns the television off.
While Shocker is far from Craven’s most effective or successful film,
the body of Pinker stands as the best example of his fascination with the
intersecting lines of humanity, technology, and the supernatural. In a
way, Pinker is a cyborg monster for the digital age—a creature who exists
within and manipulates our mass-mediated culture. Writing about the
gothic tendencies in cyberpunk fiction, Tatiani G. Rapatzikou notes, “The
appearance of new electronic and interactive technologies has challenged
the boundaries between what is human or mechanical. . . . In this new
space of pure information, machines are endowed with organic qualities,
while bodies are redesigned through the intervention of new corporeal
technological practices, such as prosthesis and virtual reality.”11 The dark
and violent images beaming through televisions become Pinker’s natural
home as he embodies and manipulates the virtual world into which we
seek our escape. The television becomes, in a sense, the mass-mediated
dream for our culture and Pinker, like Freddy before him, the dark figure
in our mass-mediated nightmares.
Craven’s gothic technologies follow the long-standing tradition in
gothic literature in which scientific knowledge fails to protect people
from the otherworldly threats provoked by its inquiries. Science and the
gothic have long had a strange relationship in that science promises to
advance rational explanations of the world and thus expand the horizon of
the diurnal world while the gothic holds out the promise of the opposite.
Much of gothic literature is predicated on the notion that these efforts to
render the world fully explainable simply stir up more of those nocturnal
entities that belie rationality and whose very existence violates our natural
laws. Certainly in films like Deadly Friend and Swamp Thing, as well as
in Serpent and the Rainbow, Craven plays out this familiar gothic motif.
However, at another level, Craven has shown a consistent and interesting
attention to the gothic possibilities in modern technologies, especially
communication technology. In a way, his vision is the dark inverse of
Marshall McLuhan’s optimistic notion of electronic media creating a
“global village.”12 For Craven, the technologies that offer to connect us
to the world around us also open a dangerous portal for the introduction
of malevolent entities like Freddy Krueger and Horace Pinker, and the
promise of such technology to keep us safe and connected ultimately
betrays us, leaving us even more stranded in the strange world between
day and night.

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 6
Gothic Families: The People under the Stairs, The
Hills Have Eyes, The Last House on the Left

American horror narratives have long centered on the family. Early hor-
ror films utilized the family as a kind of moral center, which simultane-
ously offered and needed protection. During the second golden age of
horror, however, the family took on a different role in horror films.1 In
his seminal book Hearths of Darkness, Tony Williams notes, “During
the 1970s, an unusual event affected Hollywood’s representation of the
American family. Generally revered as a positive icon of ‘normal’ human
society, the institution underwent severe assault.”2 The family at the heart
of these horror films was not portrayed as the strong moral center that
provided protection but, in a move that echoed Hitchcock’s Psycho, was
often shown as morally compromised at its core. At the root of Hitch-
cock’s film and many that followed in its shadow was the notion that,
as Williams notes, “evil lies within American society and the family.”3
Providing counterpoint to this violent and morally corrupt family was
another embattled vision of the family, the imperiled family. Horror films
during the second golden age often centered around, as Dani Cavallaro
puts it, “the penetration of the familial space by disruptive forces.” 4
The imperiled family is prominent in several of the Wes Craven films
already considered—A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s New Night-
mare, Scream, Shocker, and so on. It is also evident in one of Craven’s
minor films from 1981, Deadly Blessing, in which a woman marries into
a religious, Amish-like community only to find herself plagued by what
appears to be an incubus. In this final section, I want to focus on the

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Craven films that depict both the victimized family and the predatory
family. It is in this duality, this pairing of opposites, that Craven advances
a uniquely gothic vision of the family-centered horror narrative. In these
films, the plot is driven by the encounter between the good, civilized,
and rational family and its paired opposite: the nocturnal family of evil,
savagery, and madness.5
Perhaps the quintessential gothic family appears in Craven’s 1991 film
The People under the Stairs. Set in an urban neighborhood, this film is
also part of the series of Craven films that explore racial relations with
an emphasis on African Americans. People centers around a thirteen-
year-old African American named Poindexter, referred to throughout
the film by his nickname, “Fool.” Fool is roped into an attempted bur-
glary by his sister’s boyfriend, a street tough named Leroy; the target
of their scheme is the wealthy white couple, the Robesons, who serve
as the landlords for many of the tenements in an urban slum and who
are planning to evict all the poor families, including Fool’s. But urban
legends surround the Robesons and their mysterious and heavily forti-
fied home. After Leroy, Fool, and another accomplice make their way
into the house, they discover that it is filled with macabre terrors. The
couple—“Mum” and “Dad”—are a psychotic amalgam of greed, sexual
perversion, religious mania, and sadism. We also learn that the two are
actually brother and sister who have kidnapped their “children,” adding
a disturbing incestuous element to their “family” narrative. The couple’s
“daughter” Alice is confined and governed by the strictest discipline. Their
other “children” had all disobeyed the rules and “spoken evil” and so had
their tongues cut out. These children are kept locked in the cellar where
they feed on human flesh, and it is these frightening ghouls—abused
and abandoned children—who are the titular “people under the stairs.”
After their break-in, Leroy and the other accomplice are killed and Fool
begins a long series of cat-and-mouse chases through the house, pursued
by the shotgun-wielding Dad, involving numerous sequences of hiding
in the oddly wide spaces in between the walls and in various passage-
ways within the house. Fool is assisted by Alice and one of the “people
under the stairs” who has escaped the cellar and dwells within the secret
spaces between the walls (and thus is nicknamed Roach). Eventually
Fool escapes, with a few of the gold coins that had drawn him and his
compatriots, but he is unable to convince Alice to risk the leap from the
roof to freedom. Unable to leave the girl behind, Fool engineers a return
to the house by calling the police to investigate and then slipping in the
back door while the Robesons are distracted. Another extended pursuit

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ensues as Mum and Dad chase Fool and Alice throughout the house, but
in the end the twisted couple are slain—Mum killed by her “children”
as Alice stabs her and the unleashed “people under the stairs” surround
her dying body, Dad blown up by Fool in the secret treasure room in the
basement. The film ends with money and gold coins raining down on the
gathered community members, and the ghoulish people under the stairs
are seen dispersing through the crowd.
Based on both the plot and the film’s title, it is clear that the gothic
home lies at the center of this story, and the extraordinary amount of
crawlspace between walls and underneath floors is remarkable. As well,
there are few films that more graphically demonstrate Gaston Bachelard’s
notion that the basement is a space of “buried madness and walled-in
tragedy.”6 In The People under the Stairs, the house is a multilayered
space, and the core of the plot is Fool’s need to work though the various
layers of lies and illusion to find its sick and corrupt heart. As the film
progresses, Fool must overcome his initial fears in order to survive. Roach,
the escaped “stair child” who lives in the walls, helps Fool escape his first
encounter with the murderous Dad and leads him to Alice, who is his
most obvious “paired opposite” in the film. Even the threatening people
under the stairs eventually befriend Fool and aid him in his final efforts to
evade the film’s primary villains. In each instance, Fool encounters what
appears, on the surface, to be monstrous but is able to find the wisdom
to see past the surface and overcome his initial fears. In this regard, it is
interesting how “normal” both Mum and Dad Robeson appear—at least
at first glance. Dressed as parodies of the 1950s Leave It to Beaver style
of parents, Mum and Dad appear to outsiders as perfectly normal and
concerned citizens. When Fool calls in the police, Mum serves cookies
and milk while Dad smokes his pipe and laments the changing neighbor-
hood that has led them to put so many security bars on their windows.
But appearances, as is often the case in gothic tales, are deceiving.
The superficially tranquil urban couple is distorted and perverse, and
the driving dynamic of the film is the contrast between Fool’s family and
the hideous “family” of the Robesons and their stair children. The two
families encounter each other as polar opposites, and it is this opposition
that is at the heart of all three of Craven’s “gothic family” films. In People,
the contrast exists along interconnected racial, economic, and commu-
nal lines. The racial contrast in the film plays out along stereotypes: the
wealthy white couple exploits the poor African American community
around them while the “ghetto” is portrayed as a violent and dangerous
place. At one point, Fool has been away to obtain expensive medicine for

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his ailing mother. As he returns to their apartment, he must navigate a

stairwell filled with vagrants and hallways with fighting dogs. Indeed, it
is this economic need—especially the need for medicine to treat his ill
mother—that compels Fool to accompany Leroy on the ill-fated burglary.
While the interrelated economic contrast is clear—the poor African
Americans being evicted by the wealthy and greedy white landlords—it
is obvious that there is an uglier picture being painted here. The white
Robesons are not merely greedy but utterly perverted by their greed, the
treasure room at the bottom of the basement serving as a center of grav-
ity that warps their development, pulling them inward and downward.
Cannibalism fits in well here. As Robin Wood notes, “Cannibalism rep-
resents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human
relations under capitalism.”7 Mum and Dad Robeson act as cannibals
both physically—feeding portions of Leroy to the ravenous people under
the stairs—and economically. Their exploitation of the impoverished
community around them has filled a cellar room with gold and money,
and it is fitting in this regard that the film’s final moment occurs in this
treasure room. As Dad pursues Fool down into the house’s lowest—and
thereby most secretive and tragic—levels, he hears what he thinks are
gold coins dropping to the ground. Believing that Fool is as obsessed with
wealth as he is, Dad is sure that Fool is counting the gold coins, but this
turns out to be a trick effected by Fool through the use of melting candles.
Fool has secreted to another room, and as Dad enters the inner vault,
Fool blows him up using the dynamite stored in the room. The resulting
explosion not only defeats Dad but sends money and coins blowing out of
the house and raining down onto the crowd of neighbors, a spectacular
and climactic redistribution of wealth.
The gathered crowd is another indication of the contrast between
the Robesons and Fool’s family. In the film’s final act, the impending
deaths of Fool and Alice are diverted by the unexpected intrusion of Fool’s
relatives. They have come demanding economic justice from the greedy
landlords, and soon the house is surrounded by a chanting crowd of agi-
tated neighbors who not only disrupt the pursuit of Fool and Alice but
also stand to bear witness to any violence done. Fool’s family is, in this
way, defined in part by its connection to the community—the bonds of
affection that make a neighborhood. The Robesons, by contrast, are the
epitome of the isolated nuclear family. The revelation of their incestu-
ous nature adds to the sense of a family that has collapsed so deeply into
itself, pulled inward by its own greed and hatred of those outside, as to
become a monstrous caricature of family. The hold of this seclusion and

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this fear of the outside—perhaps exacerbated by the racial differences

between the Robesons and their neighborhood—are evidenced in Alice’s
reluctance to leave. At the end of Fool’s first run through the Robesons’
gothic house, he escapes by slipping out an attic window and dropping
into what he hopes will be the pond located in the back of the house, a
leap of faith that turns out to be rewarded. Alice, however, is too afraid
of the outside and at this point is too deeply in the grips of her “family.”
Interestingly, it is only after she learns that Mum and Dad are not her real
parents that she gains the courage to turn on them and leave the twisted
space of the “family” home.
Fear of others is also at the root of one of Craven’s earlier explora-
tions of the family, his 1977 The Hills Have Eyes. This fear is wrapped up
in familial relations and the encounter of an apparently “good” family
with an “Other” family whose savagery and menace lead to a radical
transformation in the “good” family. The same basic plot is also present
in Craven’s first, most controversial and arguably most disturbing film,
The Last House on the Left. Before turning to that first film, it is worth
considering some of the gothic dimensions at play in Craven’s second
film, The Hills Have Eyes.

The savage Hill clan threatens the Carter family in Craven’s The Hills Have
Eyes. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).

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In many ways, Hills derives from the core notion of “gothic,” with its
focus on the primitivism and savagery of the nocturnal world. The story
is relatively straightforward: in spite of warnings to avoid the rural roads
winding through a desolate California desert, a father, Bob Carter, leads
his family into the vast wasteland only to have their recreational vehicle
break down. As the family is now stranded, the father and son-in-law head
out, looking for help. Soon the father is attacked and killed by Jupiter,
the leader of a demented clan of outcasts who live in the wasteland, and
this begins a process by which the Carters are systematically attacked by
members of Jupiter’s clan. Soon Bob’s wife is also dead, as is one of their
daughters. The family’s baby is kidnapped, and this leads to the climactic
struggle between the remaining Carter family and the hill dwellers. The
family’s German shepherd kills one of the hill clan, Pluto, and brother
and sister Bobby and Brenda fight off and kill Jupiter. The father of the
stolen baby girl recovers her with the aid of one of the hill clan, Ruby, and
kills the remaining male clan member, Mars.
In Hills, the gothic house is notable in its absence. The main action
takes place in a remote and utterly desolate part of the desert, and the
closest the Carters have to a refuge is their disabled recreational vehicle.
This temporary refuge, however, is no secure home, and as the film dem-
onstrates on several occasions, its boundaries are permeable. Deprived
of the comforts of home, the Carters take on the role of early settlers
facing the dangers of the wild, and in a gesture toward early American
literature, they must overcome these dangers in order to preserve their
hold on civilization. At the heart of this contest is their encounter with the
uncivilized—the savage. As Allan Lloyd Smith notes, “At the heart of the
American Gothic wilderness is the savage Indian, and the overdetermined
compulsion of the settler to kill and to signal his triumph over the bar-
baric in a supposed distinction from the primitive, which unmistakably
includes a doubling of his own nature with the savage.”8 In this way, the
Carters begin to be stripped of their comforts and cultural norms and
are left to face their double—the savage, primitive native family.
The isolation and vulnerability of the Carter family also draw attention
to the gothic body. Those in the hill clan provide an interesting example
of Craven’s early exploration of the gothic body, and their anachronistic
primitivism is noteworthy. Dressed in a mix of native, primitive garb
and scraps of the modern world, members of the hill clan—much as
the chainsaw family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)—exist in a
backwater eddy of modern society. Abandoned by the modern world—at
the beginning of the film’s second act, we learn that the father of the clan,

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Jupiter, was abandoned by his father because of his monstrous appearance

and actions—those in the hill clan have established their own world. This
world is constituted in a deserted area used by the military for bombing
exercises, suggesting both their distance from the modern world and their
savage proximity to it. Having killed the father of the Carter family, Jupiter
complains to his corpse, “[You] stick your life in my face,” suggesting the
anger and resentment that is fueling his and his family’s brutal acts of
murder and cannibalism.
There is a long precedent in gothic literature for this notion—the sav-
age, primitive, nocturnal world existing hidden in the neglected corners of
the civilized, modern world. Reflecting on the emergence of gothic urban
spaces in the nineteenth-century works of authors like Charles Dickens,
David Punter and Glennis Byron note that “the savage and primitive are
shown to exist in the very heart of the modern, civilized metropolis.”9
Existing in the wilderness, those of the Hill clan fit squarely into this
tradition. They are an odd mix of primitive and modern—they use savage
knives but also walkie-talkies, a nocturnal threat existing at the center
of modern America and, perhaps more important, in the midst of the
proving grounds of America’s military prowess. The observation that
the area is a bombing range is fitting and likely resonated with American
audiences in the late 1970s, a period in which America was just begin-
ning to reconcile itself to the failed Vietnam War. Indeed, as the film
reaches its final act, Bobby calls for help on the family’s CB radio. A
voice responds, claiming to be Air Force security and asking about the
family’s “defensive capabilities.” Foolishly, Bobby confesses that they are
almost out of ammunition and very vulnerable, at which point the voice
reveals itself as one of the primitive Hill clan—the family’s faith in the
American military betrayed.
The Hills Have Eyes emerged as one of a series of films focused on a kind
of rural American gothic—films in which a savage and primitive group of
people living within the United States pose danger to the civilized group
who stray into their territory, films like Two Thousand Maniacs (1964),
Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Motel Hell (1980).10
In Hills, as in most of the films in this subgenre, the focus is not only on
the brutality of the primitive family but also on the lengths to which the
“civilized” group will go to survive. Not surprisingly, then, in the third
act it is those of the Carter family who become the aggressors. In a clas-
sic motif of Craven films, Bobby and Brenda rig a series of booby traps
to kill the clan’s head, Jupiter. After the monstrous Jupiter is snagged by
a snare and violently dragged across the desert floor, the Carter siblings

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trick him into following them into the recreational vehicle, which they
have rigged with a leaking propane tank and matches connected to the
door. Slipping out the back window, the two wait for Jupiter to follow
them through the door, at which point the vehicle explodes. Somehow,
however, Jupiter survives, and it is here that the surviving Carter children
show the lengths to which this encounter has driven them. Grabbing a
hatchet, Brenda lunges at Jupiter, hacking him violently. As the monster
falls, Bobby fires his remaining shells into his body. The film’s final battle
is between Doug, the father of the abducted infant, and Mars, the abduc-
tor of the child. The baby is rescued, and the film ends with Doug savagely
beating the dead body of Mars with a large stone as the screen turns to red.
It is notable that the film does not conclude with the Carter family’s
escape—indeed, we never see them leave the desert—but rather with their
descent into violence. The civilized Carters find in the desert their mirror
opposite, a grim and brutal gothic family who challenge and ultimately strip
away their cultural norms and expectations. It is important that the father,
Bob Carter, a retired policeman, is the first to die, burned alive in front of
his family. The destruction of the central male authority figure—and the
individual whose hubris led his family into the desert in spite of earlier
warnings—leaves the family adrift, and it is only through violent acts that
the remaining members survive. As D. N. Rodowick observes, “What the
film gradually reveals is that there is no comfortable distance between the
Carter family and the ‘monster’ family which threatens them.”11
The notion of redemption and maturation through violence, espe-
cially for young men like Bobby and Doug, has been a prevalent theme
in American films, and the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw
the rise of a particularly brutal variation. In films like Sam Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs (1971) and John Boorman’s Deliverance, there is a clear sense
that violent acts of retribution are a necessary part of the world and that
no matter what the constraints of civilized behavior, we are all capable
of horrific cruelty.12 Clearly, Craven’s Hills fits into the broader theme,
but perhaps his most important contribution to the complex relationship
between cinema and violence comes in his first feature-length film, The
Last House on the Left.
Reviewing Last House for the New York Times, Howard Thompson con-
fessed to walking out of the “thing (as opposed to a film)” after fifty min-
utes, reporting, “The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed
the inept actors is Wes Craven. It’s at the Penthouse Theater, for anyone
interested in paying to see repulsive people and human agony.”13 Loosely
based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan),

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which in turn is based on a thirteenth-century Swedish ballad, Last House

follows young Mari Collingwood on the eve of her seventeenth birthday.
She leaves her idyllic rural home to attend a concert with her friend Phyllis
in the city. When the two young women go looking for marijuana, they
accidentally fall into the company of the murderous Krug and his gang.
Radio reports detail the gang’s litany of crimes, including rape, child moles-
tation, and the murder of priests and nuns. After apparently raping and
beating the two girls, the murderous group—made up of Krug, his accom-
plice Weasel, their bisexual girlfriend Sadie, and Krug’s heroin-addicted
son Junior—head upstate to dispose of the two young women. When their
car breaks down on a rural road, the gang take Phyllis and Mari into the
woods for more—and graphically detailed—humiliation, including forcing
Phyllis to urinate on herself and making the two women engage in sexual
activities. Phyllis seeks to escape but fails and is murdered. Mari is then
brutally raped again. After the assault, she is traumatized and wanders
into a nearby pond, where Krug unceremoniously shoots her to death.
The film’s third act finds Krug and company unwittingly taking refuge
in the home of the Collingwoods until their car can be repaired. After an
awkward dinner, the Collingwoods discover their daughter’s necklace in
the possession of the gang. They soon head into the woods, where they
discover Mari’s body, before returning to begin a series of murderous
acts of revenge. Weasel’s penis is bitten off by Mrs. Collingwood after she
seduces him. Mr. Collingwood fights with Krug, but the younger man
bests the grieving father. Only the intervention of Junior, Krug’s abused
and heroin-addicted son, prevents Krug from killing the older man, and as
revenge, Krug convinces his son to shoot himself in the head. This diver-
sion gives Mr. Collingwood enough time to grab a chainsaw, and as the
bumbling local law enforcement arrives, Mr. Collingwood is carving up
Krug while Mrs. Collingwood slits Sadie’s throat. The film ends with the
horrified sheriffs looking at the carnage and the bloodied Collingwoods
clinging to each other.
The sadism in Craven’s Last House is among the most savage of any
American film in history. It is not so much that the film is graphic in its
gore but more that the film portrays brutality with virtually no distance
between the viewer and the acts themselves—a technique found in the
earlier Night of the Living Dead and also picked up in Tobe Hooper’s
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the final rape sequence, during which the
innocent Mari Collingwood is traumatized, the camera brings us directly
into the faces of the brutish Krug and the horrified Mari, lingering on
the evil and the innocence, forcing us to occupy the same physical space

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as the culminating act of sadism.14 The extended sequence of cruelty

that occupies the film’s second act makes the final violent outburst by
Mari’s wronged parents all the more cathartic and shocking but also, as
with Craven’s later Hills, blurs the lines between the good and innocent
Collingwoods and the evil and depraved Krug gang.
The emergence of the evil Krug gang into the familial space of Craven’s
first film suggests the potency of this blurring motif within his work, a
motif also taken up in Hills. Unlike that later film, the gothic house clearly
plays a major role in Last House, and it is notable that the tranquil, familial
space of the Collingwood home becomes a killing ground complete with
booby traps set up by Mr. Collingwood. The gothic body is not so clearly
on display in Last House, in part because the acts of violence are rooted
strongly, perhaps too strongly, in the fragile physicality of the real world.
But what is most intriguing in Craven’s first film is his early exploration
of the gothic form.
On its surface, Last House does not seem to resemble the more formal
gothic experiments of Craven’s later films like New Nightmare or Scream
3. But some of the most disturbing aspects of Last House come in its jar-
ring use of discordant editing and its soundtrack. The film has an almost
anarchic quality, especially in regard to these two elements, and it is in
these chaotic cuts and inappropriate musical choices that the film under-
mines our familiarity with our own viewing position. As an example,
during the harrowing sequence of humiliations visited upon the girls in
the woods, the scene cuts back and forth to the bumbling efforts of the
local law enforcement. First, as the girls are led into the woods (which we
later learn is only yards away from the Collingwood home), we see the
police drive past the killers’ car. After Phyllis is forced to wet herself and
the two girls are stripped, the scene shifts back to the two officers as they
have a light-hearted discussion of local eccentrics. The scene then shifts
back to the thugs as they prepare to murder the girls, and as Phyllis tries
to escape, the scene again shifts back to the police, who realize that the
car they had left abandoned outside the Collingwood home belongs to the
wanted killers. After Phyllis is stabbed, the scene cuts to the two police,
who find that their car has run out of gas, before quickly cutting back
to the gang members tracking down Phyllis to finish the job. After the
killers return to Mari, the scene cuts back to the two officers as they try
to hitchhike, only to be harassed by local hippies who scream, “We hate
cops!” Perhaps the most unsettling cut is after Mari has been murdered.
The scene abruptly shifts to a comical sequence as the officers negotiate
a ride with a woman hauling a load of chickens.

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While horror films have a long tradition of “comic relief,” the shifts
between horrific acts of sadism with little aesthetic distance and the antics
of two police officers is remarkably disconcerting, not so much relieving
the tension as leaving the viewer unsettled. It is unclear how we are to
make sense of these shifts—are they meant to cast the terror in a comical
light or provide comic relief? The cinematic frame of violence is placed
too close for comfort and then abruptly pulled away.
In this regard, the soundtrack is equally disturbing. Sequences of vio-
lence are either underscored by melodic and soothing music or else by
the film’s recurring bouncy bluegrass theme song. For example, as Krug
and his gang drive north with the two girls stowed in the car’s trunk,
the happy singer explains the plot accompanied by banjos and a kazoo:
Weasel and Junior, Sadie and Krug
Out for the day with the Collingwood crew
Out for the day for some fresh air and sun
Let’s have some fun with those two lovely chil-
dren and off them as soon as we’re done.
The cumulative effect of both the disorienting editing and the disjunc-
tive soundtrack is to leave viewers uncertain of their position in relation
to the film’s narrative. We are unsure of which frame—comic or tragic—
is dominant and so have no clear way of interpreting the odd series of
scenes that make up the film’s disturbing second act. Uncertain of how
we stand in relation to the actions upon the screen, we are forced to
grapple with these jarring and contradictory cinematic forms, and this
is, in many ways, precisely the way that gothic functions, mingling light
and dark and rendering things familiar—violence and sex and sadism—in
forms that make them eerily unfamiliar. As Tony Williams notes, “Last
House begins by depicting opposites, gradually blurring barriers, until
the audience’s emotional involvement with violent actions leads not to
catharsis but self-disgust and self-awareness.”15 In this way, Last House
presents us not only with Craven’s first gothic family—the murderous
Krug gang—but also with Craven’s first exploration of the gothic form
in cinema. The tagline for the film is instructive in this regard: “To avoid
fainting, keep repeating: it’s only a movie.”

Craven’s Gothic Rhetoric

In his influential essay on the uncanny, Freud noted that “an uncanny
effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is
blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have

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until now considered imaginary.”16 In many ways, this statement char-

acterizes Wes Craven’s notion of horror. Whether through the appear-
ance of past crimes in the demonic form of Freddy Krueger or through
the manifestation of savage violence in the heart of an American family,
Craven’s films have attended to this blurred line between our repressed
anger and anxieties and the social reality that keeps these things con-
tained. Throughout his work, Craven has framed this line in gothic terms.
As I have tried to demonstrate, Craven’s gothic sensibilities have had an
enormous impact on the shape of his films. Navigating the lines between
the diurnal and nocturnal worlds, characters in Craven’s films must dis-
cern the differences between dreams and waking, film and reality, and
savagery and civilization. The audience for Craven’s films also must navi-
gate these unstable lines within a cinematic vision that favors multiple
layers of mirroring. In several of Craven’s works, we find the supernatural
mirroring dreams mirroring the filmic experience itself. These thin lines
between fantasy and reality also manifest in recurring physical forms,
notably the house and the body. Craven’s houses are not so much gothic
in the traditional architectural sense as they are spaces in which secrets
lie buried and hidden in basements and in gaps between walls. Char-
acters trapped inside these houses must journey into the inner heart of
these spaces—often in the subterranean spaces of their basements and
cellars—in order to draw out the past and overcome it. The creatures
in these films often appear as gothic bodies, savage, uncivilized, and
occasionally otherworldly. Craven’s villains take enormous amounts of
physical punishment in a series of increasingly exaggerated confronta-
tions but continue to pose a threat until the protagonists take up their
own agency, refuse the fear, and cast off the veneer of civility. This is not
so much an endorsement of violence as a critique of our unquestioned,
taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world around us.
One of the functions of gothic narratives, and certainly one that Cra-
ven has embraced, is to unsettle our apparently sure foundations. Thus,
it should not be surprising that two of Craven’s most consistent targets
for gothic critique are science and the family. Science and technology
promise clarity and certainty, but the gothic narratives of Wes Craven
suggest ways that scientific pursuits and technological innovations open
the doors for dark forces to enter our lives. Families promise emotional
and moral foundations, but in Craven’s gothic world they can become
twisted and deformed. Further, an encounter with one of these distorted
gothic families challenges our notions of civility and reveals a potentially
violent heart at the center of the human condition.

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This interest in unsettling our sense of security may also provide some
hint at Craven’s persistent motif of booby traps. Throughout his films,
ranging from Last House to the Scream series, Craven’s protagonists
have sought to use booby traps in an effort to overcome their tormen-
tors. Booby traps, it is worth noting, are a decidedly unsettling means of
attack—they are designed to lie hidden under a layer of apparent normalcy
until tripped, at which point they unleash their violent consequences.
Craven may be hinting at a potential survival strategy in a world in which
evil and danger hide in unseen corners just outside our rational gaze, since
booby traps are one way in which the tables are turned and the hunter
becomes the hunted.
Across his long career, Craven has consistently unsettled audiences
with disturbing imagery and difficult narrative structures. He has also
reliably crafted films that not only were financial success but also proved
to be highly influential. Indeed, of the three directors considered in this
book, Craven has been the most consistently successful, making cultur-
ally important films in the 1970s (Last House), 1980s (Nightmare), and
1990s (Scream). In part, his success is attributable to his dramatically
evolving style—a point that has been generally overlooked throughout
the preceding analysis. The low-budget brutality of Last House and Hills
bear relatively little surface resemblance to the supernaturally fantastic
Nightmare or Shocker, and, in turn, neither of these resembles the slick,
self-referential parody of Scream or Cursed. This evolving style can be
attributed, in part, to the filmmaker’s maturation and, in part, to the
increasing financial resources backing his later films. But there is also a
sense in which Craven’s style has proven more adaptable in relation to
changing cultural tastes than either George Romero’s or John Carpenter’s,
and this adaptability may be grounded in Craven’s broader gothic sensi-
bilities. If, as I have tried to argue, Craven’s notion of horror is located at
the intersection of reality and fantasy, then the contours of his narratives
will be largely dictated by the cultural shape of the fantastic. So, as the
cultural aesthetics of our collective dreams—disseminated through film
and television—change, so too will the gothic narratives that occupy their
boundaries. This is the ground in which Wes Craven has cultivated his
nightmares for more than three decades.

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 Part Three

Desolate Frontiers in the Films of John Carpenter

A uniquely geographic logic underlies much of the work of John Car-

penter. Carpenter’s films are filled with forbidden places and secluded
locations, populated by drifters and outlaws and malevolent forces. The
locales of these films are almost always isolated in one way or another. In
both The Fog and Village of the Damned, remote coastal towns become
the target of malevolent forces, and even the urban settings of films like
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Big Trouble in Little China, and Prince of
Darkness (1987) find the principals trapped and separated from the world
outside.
Critics have long noted, and Carpenter has readily admitted, that he
is in many ways a director of Westerns, in spite of the fact he has not
produced a film recognizably within that genre. The vast majority of
Carpenter’s work—while filled with aliens and vampires and futuristic
outlaws—draws inspiration from the films of Howard Hawks and John
Ford rather than older horror pictures. As with those classic directors and
their peers, Carpenter’s heroes are often loners and drifters, outlaws who
are just trying to survive in badlands, or else they are part of ragtag groups
of compatriots who must overcome their differences to survive a siege
of their last remaining fortress.1 For my purposes, however, the Western
genre is too limiting, and in this chapter I seek to connect Carpenter to
the broader American mythology that gave rise to the Western, namely
the notion of the frontier.
As I argue throughout this section, Carpenter utilizes the motif of the
frontier much in the way that George Romero utilizes the body and Wes
Craven employs the gothic. In Carpenter’s films, the frontier is a liminal

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space in between the normal structures of society and the dangerous

realms of the wild and uncivilized, and in this way, the frontier serves as
the location for Carpenter’s vision of horror. On one side of the frontier
lie all those strictures of social order and repression that constitute civi-
lization, and just beyond its edge lies the embodiment of that which has
been repressed and now seeks to return. Carpenter’s vision of the horrific
frontier follows a long and healthy literary tradition. As David Mogen,
Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski note, “As the imaginative border
between the known and the unknown, the frontier subject has provided a
bridge to the gothic domain.”2 Indeed, gothic themes entered into Ameri-
can literature largely through tales of lone figures facing the primitive
terrors of the frontier. The American literary tradition translated the
European genre such that, as Leslie A. Fiedler notes, “the heathen, unre-
deemed wilderness and not the decaying monuments of a dying class,
nature and not society becomes the symbol for evil.”3 Not surprisingly,
then, Carpenter’s films are typically set in isolated outposts and villages
where chaotic, often primeval forces of the past prepare to invade and
disrupt the civilized order of society.
The American sense of the frontier as a site of conquest emerged from
this fear of the wilderness and is most influentially articulated in Freder-
ick Jackson Turner’s 1920 The Frontier in American History, in which he
advances what has become known as the “Frontier Thesis.” In this work,
Turner contends that the continual expansion of Americans into new
lands in the West was the central defining factor in the development of
American culture. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
American development,” he writes.4 In Turner’s view, the frontier pro-
vided a unique environment for the development of American notions of
progress in large part because it was conceived of as a wide-open space
of virtually limitless possibilities. As Turner argues, “American develop-
ment has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to
primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new
development for that area. American social development has been con-
tinually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this
fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportuni-
ties, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish
the forces dominating American character.”5 In Turner’s view—a view
adopted by numerous historians, politicians, and cultural critics—this
frontier mentality provided a foundation for American exceptionalism
and with it the belief that Americans were a uniquely inventive, virtuous,

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 Introduction

and powerful people. This view continues to hold immense influence

within American culture, and, as more recent critics have noted, “the
frontier experience has so profoundly altered our cultural history that it
affects our sense of ourselves even today.”6
While Carpenter’s films utilize this sense of a chaotic frontier, there
is a crucial distinction between Carpenter’s use of the frontier mythol-
ogy and Turner’s celebration of it. In the general understanding of it, the
frontier is a site of perpetual progress—the manifest destiny of a people
who can and in some ways must continue to move forward into new and
uncharted territories. The classic Westerns fall along these lines with the
inexorable movement of pioneers and then settlers and then towns into
the vast space that was once only primitive wilderness.7 The indigenous
inhabitants of these spaces are perceived as both savage threats and tar-
gets for “civilizing,” and while there may be a pang of nostalgia at the loss
of the wide-open spaces, there is a sense of inevitability in the expansion
of this uniquely American civilization. In Carpenter’s cinematic logic,
the frontier mythology lingers, but its trajectory is reversed. His films
are peopled not by pioneers but by the isolated remnants of a civilization
that has begun a slow, painful withdrawal. The primitive forces of wild
places are not so much to be overcome as survived, and it is often those
forces that seem inevitable and overwhelming, reclaiming the spaces
abandoned by an American culture in retreat.
As early as 1923, D. H. Lawrence recognized the fearsome savagery
contained within our images of the frontier and proclaimed: “Doom!
Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the dark trees of Amer-
ica. Doom!”8 Whether in the abandoned police station in Assault on Pre-
cinct 13, the derelict church in Prince of Darkness, the New Mexico ghost
town in Vampires (1998), or the devastated cityscapes of the futuristic
Escape from New York and Escape from L.A. (1996), Carpenter’s cinematic
geography has mapped these spaces of doom. But where the earlier fron-
tier mythology focused on the capacity of civilization to overcome these
dangerous spaces, Carpenter’s films provide a graphic reversal of the
frontier mythology of progress. These are spaces filled with abandoned
cars and crumbling buildings, spaces in which the institutions of society
have withdrawn and the hope of civilized behavior has collapsed.9 In part
because of this, Carpenter’s films are decidedly masculine spaces. With
the obvious exception of Laurie in Halloween, Carpenter’s heroes are
typically men, and even these men are hypermasculine. They are often
drifters, mercenaries, and outlaws, like Snake Plissken in the Escape films,
Desolation Williams in Ghosts of Mars, and Napoleon Wilson in Assault

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on Precinct 13.10 When Carpenter’s films are not focused on this resource-
ful drifter—usually a stranger in a strange land—they typically attend
to a band of people who find themselves besieged by primitive forces
and locked in a battle for survival. But in both versions, the emphasis is
on the frontier myth in reverse: a desolate frontier encroaching on the
shrinking space of civilization.
In this section, I survey the desolate frontier of John Carpenter with
particular attention to the ways in which his geographic sensibilities
have shaped his films and their politics. While not all of Carpenter’s
films fit easily into this schema—1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, for
instance, is a notable exception—there is a remarkable consistency in
his attention to the spatial location of fear and danger in general and the
frontier myth in reverse in particular. In tracing this geographic logic, I
explore Carpenter’s motifs of the siege, the threshold, and the drifter-hero
and consider the ways in which these motifs help shape the contours of
Carpenter’s unique vision of horror.

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 7
Sites under Siege: Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13,
The Thing, Village of the Damned

While John Carpenter is most noted for directing Halloween, the seminal
film in the “stalk and slash” cycle that dominated the horror genre through-
out the 1980s, his two earlier films provide a clearer glimpse of the geo-
graphic sensibilities that dominate his oeuvre. Dark Star, Carpenter’s first
feature film, was begun as a short student project in 1970 but not released
as a feature-length film until 1974.1 While the film has all the limitations
of a low budget, student-produced film, it is still instructive. Set aboard a
starship named the Dark Star at some indeterminate point in the future,
the film is a kind of parody of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The film centers on
the all-male crew of the Dark Star, whose mission seems to be destroying
“unstable planets” using smart bombs that cheerfully arm and launch them-
selves. Much of the film follows the men as they labor amid the boredom
and isolation of decades aboard the ship with no one but themselves for
company. The degree of their alienation is revealed in a scene in which the
men realize they no longer can remember each other’s first names or even
their own. The limited action kicks in when one of the bombs malfunctions
and is unable to disengage from the ship. As the countdown ticks on, one of
the crew attempts to convince the bomb that it should not explode because
it cannot be certain of the existence of the universe around it—a play on
Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am” line of reasoning. In the end,
the logic is insufficient and the bomb decides to detonate, destroying the
ship and sending two surviving crew members in different directions. One
is caught up in a comet cluster and begins what he believes will be a long

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 Desolate Frontiers in the Films of John Carpenter

loop around the universe; the other heads into the atmosphere of a nearby
planet riding a piece of the ship’s debris like a surfboard.
Much of Dark Star attends to the overwhelming isolation and loneli-
ness of the men on the ship and the fraying of their sanity after decades
alone in space. A second and related element is the sense of desolation
that characterizes Carpenter’s vision of space. Space, of course, has long
been portrayed as a vast emptiness, but in Dark Star it is also a danger-
ously unstable place. Indeed, the mission of the spacecraft is to destroy
“unstable planets,” and in this way the mission of the crew is to expand
this desolation. The fact that the reason for these planet-bombings is never
explained contributes to the air of pointlessness that pervades the film.
A third notable element in Carpenter’s first film is a sense of regression.
The film opens, for example, with a video message from Earth in which a
government official apologizes that the crew’s request for protective radia-
tion shielding—their commander had died from a radiation leak—has
been denied due to insufficient funds. The men aboard the Dark Star are
at the very edge of the human frontier, but rather than clearing a path for
the expansion of human civilization, they seem to have been abandoned
by a culture that can no longer reach them.
These nascent themes evident in Dark Star mature in Carpenter’s first
fully developed feature-length film, Assault on Precinct 13. Assault is in
many ways a Western set in modern times, and the plot revolves around
the closing of a police station in Los Angeles, which is actually District
Thirteen of Precinct Nine (the title was selected by the distributor, who
evidently had not paid close attention to the details of the plot). The
film’s opening establishes a Wild West sense of lawlessness as police
officers slaughter a group of street gang members involved in a break-in.
The gang leaders—a decidedly multiracial group—vow a blood oath for
revenge and steal a shipment of automatic weapons. At the same time,
newly appointed police lieutenant Bishop is assigned to the soon-to-be-
abandoned Precinct Nine, and as the skeleton crew prepares to shut down
the precinct, two unrelated events conspire to propel the plot forward.
A bus carrying inmates for transfer to prison—including a dangerous
killer named Napoleon Wilson—makes an emergency stop at the precinct
because one of the inmates has become violently ill. Another sequence
involves a middle-class white man and his daughter becoming lost in the
dangerous streets near the precinct. As the young girl buys an ice cream
cone, she is gunned down by one of the gang leaders. The father finds a
pistol in the ice cream truck and shoots one of the gang. The remaining
gang members pursue the man, who runs until he finds himself at the

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precinct, and the stage is set for the ensuing siege, which will dominate
the remainder of the film.
In many ways, the siege is a perfect motif for Carpenter’s frontier logic.
Alone and isolated, the few holdouts within the precinct find themselves
cut off by violent forces. Earlier establishing shots paint a grim picture of
the streets outside. This is an exaggerated image of the dangerous urban
ghetto, replete with burned-out cars, boarded-up windows, and broken
glass. The streets are filled with litter, and the sense of lawlessness is
accentuated by the brutal scene in which the young girl is gunned down
at the ice cream truck. The gang member points the pistol in an almost
nonchalant manner at the girl, and the suddenness of the gunshot pro-
vides a shock to the viewer, who surely imagines she will be endangered
but not killed. The precinct itself marks the grimmest point of the desolate
frontier. The streets surrounding it have been abandoned, and the build-
ing has fallen into disrepair. In spite of this, when the first gunshots bring
down one of the two remaining police officers left outside the precinct
building and those inside realize they are under siege, there is disbelief
that they can be so isolated. Lieutenant Bishop seeks to calm one of the
women trapped with him: “We’re in the middle of a city, inside a police
station. Someone is bound to drive by eventually.” But no one does. In
Carpenter’s desolate frontier, the isolated band is alone and surrounded
by armed and relentless attackers.
Gang members in Assault are typical of villains in several of Car-
penter’s films, in large part because they remain anonymous. While we
glimpse the leaders of the gang near the film’s beginning, for the most
part they are shadowy figures standing at the periphery of the precinct’s
grounds. During one of their assaults, they are a seemingly endless legion
of bodies climbing through windows and smashing at doors. As one gang
member is shot or brought down, another rises to fill his place in a long
line of seeming cannon fodder. The mob imagery is a clear allusion to the
countless cinematic Native Americans portrayed as “savage Indians” who
terrorized movie cowboys for decades—though Carpenter is careful here
in his racial politics; the gang is notably multiracial, and the protagonist,
Bishop, is an African American. While the cinematic grammar of the
onslaught of gang members may be from the classic Western, it is also
an image that furthers Carpenter’s vision of the urban frontier. These
are not recognizable villains with specific agendas—they have sworn a
“blood oath” for revenge, but there is no lengthy dialogue concerning
their beliefs or plans—but are forces of chaos, lawless men who have no
respect for authority or even value for their own lives.

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Lieutenant Bishop defends the station from dangerous gang members in

Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).
One other related cinematic technique is notable in Assault, and it is
a shot that occurs in so many Carpenter films as to be a virtual signa-
ture. As the camera frames the action in front of us—in this instance, an
establishing shot of the station at night—a series of figures move rapidly
across the frame, too close to be in focus and too quickly to be recog-
nizable. Similar scenes of suddenly moving figures blurring across the
audience’s field of vision occur prominently in Escape from New York,
and in both cases they represent the unpredictability of the environment
and remind us of our own limited perspective. This shot reinforces the
vastness of the cinematic space in which Carpenter’s films operate in that
dangers appear not only from the front or rear but suddenly and from
any direction. At one level, these shots interrupted by sudden movement
serve as a simple startle effect—in several films, they are accompanied by
a sudden striking chord in the soundtrack—but at a broader level, they
underscore the randomness of the threats lurking in these desolate and
isolated places where large gangs (or cannibalistic mutants in Escape from
New York or satanically controlled homeless people in Prince of Darkness
or embodied Martian spirits in Ghosts of Mars) lurk just at the edge of
our field of vision.

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These dangerous figures are the embodiment of the savage wilderness

that was imagined just past the edge of the original frontier, and it was
into this dangerous and lawless region that early settlers and pioneers
ventured. It is notable in this regard that Assault follows the logic of the
frontier movement in reverse that is evident in several of Carpenter’s
films. The precinct is being shut down and the forces of law and order
are retreating to another precinct. The survivors (now including the
inmates being transferred) who fight off the waves of gang members are
not seeking to establish a new place but to simply survive so that they
too can move elsewhere. The police station in which they fight off their
attackers is not being established but decommissioned, and the film’s
ending suggests not so much the reestablishment of law and order as
the survival of those who were able to become as savage and dangerous
as their attackers.
The pairing of Bishop and Napoleon Wilson also suggests the limits of
law as a force for order. Wilson is a dangerous killer, as we are informed
early in the film, and his resourcefulness is shown when he is able to
knock over a prison guard who has offended him, even while shackled at
both wrists and ankles. Unlike the savage and anonymous gang members,
however, Wilson is clearly a man of honor. He recognizes that the besieged
group must work together. When one of the other inmates tries to make
it out of the surrounded station to a nearby parked car, Wilson reminds
him of his duty to those inside: “One thing. When you get out of here,
make sure you call the cops before you head off to the border.” Of course,
Wilson is another Western archetype—the dangerous gunslinger making
good in his final moments. Indeed, several of his signature lines are lifted
directly from classic Westerns as homage to this legacy. When asked to
explain his criminal life, for instance, Wilson responds, “Only at the point
of dying,” meaning his explanation will not come until he is breathing
his last. The same line is uttered by Charles Bronson’s character in Sergio
Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Bishop is also a Western
archetype—the good-hearted but inexperienced lawman who must take
on an outlaw as a partner. In a broader sense, their pairing functions not
only as a gesture to the Western traditions from which Assault is drawn
but as a commentary on the very notion of law and order on the edges of
a culture in retreat. Bishop insists during the first moments of the siege
that some police backup is bound to come and that the hail of bullets
will draw attention, but he is wrong. The police units that go looking
for the reported gunfire initially decide not to look around the derelict
police station precisely because it is abandoned. Bishop soon realizes that

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he and his group are alone and that their only hope for survival lies in
overcoming the division between order and chaos.
The third prominent figure among the besieged is Leigh, one of the pre-
cinct secretaries who resembles what Naomi Wise has called the “Hawk-
sian woman.” Throughout the films of Howard Hawks—one of Carpenter’s
most prominent influences—female characters embodied an odd mix of
gender stereotypes. Hawksian women were beautiful and desirable but
also strong, capable, and not afraid of a fight. They were also sexually
open, even aggressive, in ways that cut against the sexual mores of the
1940s and 1950s. Wise praised Hawks for providing women who jumped
outside the traditional categories of “good girl/bad girl” and observed that
they were “some of the most honest portrayals of women in movies.”2 In
Assault, Leigh is among the first to recognize that the group is in trouble,
and she quickly picks up arms to defend herself and the station. As with
the classical Hawksian woman, she is as tough as the male characters and
capable, but there is also a vaguely tragic, romantic element in her flirta-
tion with the convicted killer Wilson. There is no real chance for romance
in these abandoned spaces, and once the siege has been finally fended off
with the long delayed arrival of police backup, Wilson is placed back into
his shackles. All appearances are that he will continue his journey to death
row, a hollow victory for all concerned and another gesture to the failure
of traditional law in the anarchic realm of the desolate frontier.
Carpenter’s clearest homage to Hawks comes not in Assault on Precinct
13—which is a reworking of ideas from Hawks’s Rio Bravo—but in his
remake of Hawks’s The Thing from Another World (1951).3 Carpenter’s The
Thing is arguably his most accomplished work, with a strong cast, tight
script, and graphic special effects. Most striking in relation to the present
discussion is the utter desolation in which The Thing is set. After a brief
opening prologue showing a spacecraft crashing toward earth, the film
begins with a long establishing shot of the frozen wasteland of Antarctica.
Rocky cliffs give way to enormous expanses of white snow and ice as the
camera follows the flight of a single dog being pursued by a helicopter.
This dog, we will later learn, is an alien shape-shifter whose presence
will bring death and destruction to the small American camp, Station
4, at which it seeks shelter, but in these initial moments, we are struck
by the cruelty of these men firing indiscriminately at the fleeing animal.
If there is any cinematic rule more precious than not shooting children,
which is violated early in Assault on Precinct 13, it is not shooting a dog.
The dog’s survival imperils the small band of Americans—notably all
men—ensconced in their scientific research camp, and soon the creature

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is revealed. Once the men realize that the alien is a shape-shifter who
likely has assumed the identity of some of them, the paranoia increases.
It is this paranoia that sets the overwhelming tone of the film as the men
turn against each other and desperately try to figure out which of them
is now the alien thing, and this paranoid tone also reveals the darkness
of Carpenter’s cinematic vision. One notable feature of Hawks’s original
film is the degree of camaraderie among the men and women who bond
together to fight off the invading alien; indeed, the bonds of loyalty and
friendship are notable strands of most Hawks films. In Carpenter’s ver-
sion, these bonds are noticeable by their absence. The men turn against
one another early and often, and the ability of the protagonist, MacReady
(Kurt Russell), to exert control is based not on loyalty but on his posses-
sion of a shotgun.
The addition of paranoia takes The Thing one step beyond the siege
mentality in Assault on Precinct 13. The men of Station 4 are completely
isolated. Radio contact has been down for weeks, and by the end of the
second act, all their transportation options have been sabotaged. The
nearest neighbors are Norwegians, who dug up the frozen “Thing” from
the ice and became its first victims. Left alone and imperiled by a threat
that can appear as one of them, the Americans turn against each other,
and in the end there are no bonding friendships like that of Wilson and
Bishop to stave off the assault.4 “Nobody trusts anybody now,” MacReady
explains. In this regard, it is interesting that the Carpenter signature
shot—a blurry figure running across our field of vision—recurs here as
the men are searching for the Thing. In this context, the blurry and fast-
moving figure does not represent the sense of masses of dangerous figures
lurking at the edge of our vision but does suggest our limited ability to
discern friends from foes, even among this small group. This sense of
paranoia lingers all the way to the film’s nihilistic ending. MacReady
and the only other survivor, Childs, have blown up most of the camp in a
desperate effort to kill the alien. Knowing that they will not survive long
in the bitter cold of the South Pole, the two battered men sit in a face-
off. Childs asks, “How will we make it?” to which MacReady responds,
“Maybe we shouldn’t.” As Childs reassures MacReady that he is not the
alien creature, MacReady explains, “If we’ve got any surprises for each
other, I don’t think we’re in any shape to do anything about it.” The film
ends as MacReady suggests, “Why don’t we wait here for a little while
and see what happens,” and the two men wait for their fate to transpire.
The pessimism infused into this final scene pervades the film, and
unlike the science fiction films of the 1950s, there is little hope that the

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invading alien can be overcome. The dark tone suggests a different sense
of alien invasion is at work here. The invasion films of the 1950s, including
Hawks’s original Thing, relied on the optimism that the alien invasion—an
allegory for potential Russian invasion and infiltration—would be battled
back by the bravery and ingenuity of the film heroes. In Carpenter’s film,
as with other pictures of this period, including Philip Kaufman’s 1978
remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the alien invasion seems insur-
mountable, and this sense adds to the motif of a retreating frontier. In
Carpenter’s film, one of the scientists does a computer simulation of the
invading creature’s abilities and finds that if it reaches an inhabited area,
the entire population of the planet would be taken over within 27,000
hours. The men of Station 4 are on the very edges of human civilization,
and it is here that they meet the invading forces from beyond. In this place,
the foe is not a figure of lawless primitivism but instead a kind of counter-
settlement. The alien thing is a pioneer, although a pioneer encroaching
into the territory the humans had long assumed was theirs—and now
they are the ones being pushed out.
The notion of being invaded by settlers from another world who seek
to overturn human civilization is even more explicit in Carpenter’s 1995
remake of the 1960 science fiction film Village of the Damned. In this film,
a mysterious alien force envelops a small coastal town, Midwich, Califor-
nia, causing all the residents to fall into a coma for a period. As police and
government officials arrive, they discover a clear and precise boundary
around the town such that anyone within the boundary falls immediately
into a coma. After a time, the people awaken, but several months later
it becomes clear that most of the women of Midwich are mysteriously
pregnant. At the encouragement of the government, the women bring
the children to term, and soon nine babies with unnaturally white hair
and abnormal intelligence are born (a tenth was stillborn). The film skips
forward several years, and we see the children exerting some form of mind
control and telepathy on the people around them. It becomes clear that
they pose a threat to humanity as we learn that there have been several
such “colonies” established in various places around the globe.
The siege theme is clear in Village. It is notable in this regard that the
village is on the coast; the cliffs play a major role as one of the children
forces her mother to leap off the cliffs to her death early in the film. It
is, like the outpost in Los Angeles and the station in Antarctica, a spot
on the very edge of civilization, and it is notable that the action never
leaves the confines of the village. When the local officials decide to inter-
vene—after it has become clear that the children are both powerful and

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malevolent—they are forced through mind control to slaughter them-

selves. In the end, there will be no help coming from outside, and once
again Carpenter’s protagonists find themselves alone in an isolated spot
and under siege from within.
As noted, the theme of a counter-settlement is made most explicit in
Village. Alan, the town physician and “parent” of the lead alien/girl, seeks
to reason with the nine alien children and asks Mara, his “daughter,”
“Why do you hate us so much, Mara?” She responds: “It isn’t a matter
of hate, it is a biological imperative . . . our actions should not surprise
you. We have to survive, no matter what the costs.” When Alan asks why
the two species cannot simply coexist, Mara responds, “If we coexist, we
shall dominate you; that is inevitable. Eventually you will try to eliminate
us. We are all creatures of the life force. Now it has set us at one another
to see who will survive.” While Alan rejects this Darwinian logic, it is
clear that Mara’s explanation of their murderous actions mirrors the
same frontier logic of American Manifest Destiny, the “God-given” right
and obligation to settle the wild frontier and eliminate all other ways
of life. In spite of Alan’s early insistence that this logic is too cruel, in
the end he succumbs to the zero-sum logic of the desolate frontier and
smuggles in a bomb to destroy the alien children. Sacrificing himself, he
kills all of them but one—the youngest and most human child, David,
is rescued by his human mother, and in the end the two drive off to an
uncertain future.
Like MacReady, Alan sacrifices himself to stave off an alien invasion
that will likely lead to the end of human civilization. He is a lone figure
who stands at the edge of the desolate frontier to face an invasion from
the outside. In all three films considered so far, the ensuing siege comes
without warning and due to no fault of the primary characters; they
are merely innocents caught up in the tumultuous and violent frontier
environment. The attack on the precinct in Assault is predicated by a
few officers’ violent enforcement of the law, and in The Thing the alien
creature is unleashed by an unwitting Norwegian scientific expedition.
In Village, there is no clear precedence for the attack and insemination,
and so, in a way, this is the purest sense of the desolate frontier as a site
of unpredictable attack and invasion.
In each of the films considered in this chapter, the protagonists find
themselves adrift in a vast wasteland—whether bitter snowscape or decay-
ing urban ghetto—and besieged by forces beyond their control. At the
heart of these stories is a variation on an age-old characteristic of the
frontier gothic, the encounter with wilderness: “an encounter,” David

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Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski note, “which histori-

cally was violent, consuming, intrinsically metaphysical, and charged
with paradox and emotional ambivalence.”5 Carpenter’s wildernesses
are not limited to the wild regions outside civilized spaces—as in The
Thing—but can manifest in rural villages or urban areas. What makes
these sites similar to the wilderness spaces of the frontier is their isolation,
their unpredictability, and their capacity to separate individuals from
the normalcy and protection of civilization. In these spaces, as Roderick
F. Nash has argued, “a person was likely to get into a disordered, con-
fused, or ‘wild’ condition. In fact, ‘bewilder’ comes from ‘be’ attached to
‘wildern.’ The image is that of a man in an alien environment where the
civilization that normally orders and controls his life is absent.”6 This
bewilderment is evident in most of Carpenter’s protagonists: the confused
and psychologically fragmenting crew of the Dark Star, the disbelieving
staff of the besieged District Nine, the crew of the Antarctic station, and
the residents of Midwich.
What makes Carpenter’s variation on the frontier mythology differ-
ent is that in each case, the protagonists imagine themselves still within
the confines of civilized space. Even the scientists and workers in The
Thing initially conceive of themselves as safely within the ordered space
of an American research base. In each of these films, however, civilization
recedes—or is pushed back—and the forces of the wild emerge to disori-
ent and threaten. These wild entities appear dangerous and lawless, and,
whether manifested as criminal gang members or otherworldly invaders,
they threaten not only the lives of the heroes but also the very fabric of
social order that constitutes civilization. Only by facing these threatening
invaders can the protagonists hope to survive and be the vanguard for
the civilization that still defines them.

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 8
Forbidden Thresholds: The Fog, Ghosts of Mars, Halloween,
Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter’s films are filled with invading forces laying siege, and
those considered in the preceding chapter share the fact that the invasions
are without any clear cause. There is no particular reason that the ruthless
gang surrounds the specific individuals within the police station in Assault
on Precinct 13 or that the alien force descends upon the specific residents
of Midwich in Village of the Damned. Misfortune simply happens.
But Carpenter’s invasions are not always so random. In the films I ex-
plore in this chapter, sieges are not the result of mere chance but instead
are the results of dark forces from the past released into the present. This
is, of course, a classic motif in ghost stories in which some unsettled
spirit connected to a past tragic event returns to haunt a location. At one
level, this sense of the buried past adds to Carpenter’s broader critique of
the foundations of contemporary civilized society. Not only did explor-
ers and settlers push forward to claim the territory once occupied by
the wild, primitive, and dangerous—forces that still linger just past our
borders—but the seizing of these wild frontier lands involved countless
acts of cruelty and injustice. These injustices do not disappear but are
buried in secret places where they await the opportunity to reemerge.
As Andrew Smith notes when discussing this classic motif in gothic lit-
erature, “The past returns and undermines the present.”1 In the films
considered in this chapter, spectral figures and ghosts emerge from the
past to seek revenge for past injustices, and in keeping with Carpenter’s
broader geographic framework, their reemergence is triggered by the

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breaking of a threshold—the physical act of crossing a boundary. In so

doing, the constructed barrier between the present and the past injustices
upon which it was built is broken.
The Fog, Carpenter’s follow-up to Halloween, provides a useful illustra-
tion of the logic of Carpenter’s forbidden thresholds. But in other ways,
it is also a tale of siege. As with Village, a small coastal town in northern
California finds itself besieged by supernatural forces. In The Fog, however,
the attack is predicated on crimes of the past. In the film’s narrative, the
town of Antonio Bay is preparing to celebrate its centennial when strange
events begin to occur related to a mysterious fog bank. We later learn that
the town’s founding was made possible by the slaughter of a wealthy leper
and his similarly afflicted compatriots who were offering to pay for land
to establish a leper colony. The town’s founding fathers chose instead to
kill the lepers and steal their gold and were aided in their evil deed by a
mysterious fog that concealed their assault. The parallel here with the
long history of American treachery toward indigenous peoples who also
had their wealth ransacked and their people killed is clear.
In the film’s climactic third act, the enormous glowing fog bank de-
scends upon the town, its movements tracked and called out by the local
radio disc jockey who watches from a local lighthouse. Soon the fog has
surrounded the town, and the film’s principal characters find themselves
under siege by the vengeful spirits contained within it. As with Assault,
there are several plot threads following different characters whose fates
are bound up together in the end. The three primary figures are Nick, a
local who becomes involved with the mysterious fog when his friend’s boat
ends up adrift with the crew missing or dead; Elizabeth, a hitchhiker who
gets wrapped up in the situation through her growing relationship with
Nick; and Stevie, the female disk jockey who eventually warns the town
of the impending threat. Stevie watches helplessly as her house and young
son are consumed by the fog and calls out on the airwaves for someone
to rescue him before she retreats to the roof of the lighthouse to avoid
the pursuing ghouls that come out of the fog. Nick and Elizabeth, who
rescue Stevie’s son, end up with a small group of townspeople at the old
church, which becomes the last refuge against the fog and also turns out
to hold the secret of the root cause of the assault.
Importantly, the main narrative begins in the church. After an open-
ing prologue in which an old man tells a version of the shipwrecked
spirits story that plays itself out in the film, the village priest discovers a
hole in the church wall behind which he discovers a journal that records
the earlier crime: the town’s original priest had led the slaughter of the

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lepers. The retrieval of this journal results in a series of mysterious events

throughout the village, including electricity going out, alarms going off,
and cars starting themselves. The supernatural manifestation of the venge-
ful ghosts corresponds to the village’s centennial anniversary, and the
only way the spirits can be vanquished is for the priest to surrender the
literal cross of gold that had been made from their plundered treasure.
The past debt is resolved in the end through the retrieval of the gold and
the murder of the priest.

Elizabeth holds off

the vengeful ghouls
in Carpenter’s The
Fog. Courtesy of British
Film Institute (BFI).

In The Fog we find several general features of the desolate frontier—an

isolated location cut off from the world and a small band of survivors
under siege. But we also see a clear example of the breaching of a forbid-
den threshold. Often in Carpenter’s films, these thresholds are the spaces
in which past crimes or tragedies lie, and the very act of crossing them
is associated with evil being unleashed. In The Fog, this breach occurs

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as the priest reaches into the newly opened hole in the church wall and
retrieves the aging diary. Crossing this threshold opens the doorway into
a space of past crimes and injustices, and it is through this doorway that
the vengeful spirits of The Fog pass. In the film, Carpenter observes the
ways that our normal world—civilization—is built upon layers of dishon-
esty and theft. Our efforts to bury these crimes, however, are never fully
successful, and repressed memories of oppressions and violations linger.
These burial sites are spaces of secrets and therefore must be hidden
and protected. As Fran Lloyd and Catherine O’Brien note, “The secret
may include the suppression of truth, the concealment of information or
the preservations of desires or dark knowledge, whether by individuals,
groups or governments. Inhabiting the city’s labyrinths, embedded in
the body, buried in the vaults of the archive or the deep recesses of the
mind, the secret is both the space and the site through which, and upon
which, the forbidden operates.”2 The forbidden threshold is forbidden
largely because it stands as both a boundary containing those remem-
bered crimes and the gateway through which spirits return to disrupt the
present. Because of its potential for disruption and chaos, as Lloyd and
O’Brien note, “the forbidden is carefully policed at its boundaries, and
transgression frequently carries a heavy price within the multiple spaces
and places of culture.”3
A similar theme occurs in Ghosts of Mars, in which violent Martian
ghosts emerge when an archaeologist inadvertently opens the ancient
crypt containing their souls. Ghosts is the most recent Carpenter film
as of this writing (although he has done a few shorter projects for cable
television). In some ways, the film can be thought of as a return to ground
covered in Assault on Precinct 13, as it also centers on the odd pairing
of a dangerous and resourceful outlaw and a law enforcement officer. In
Ghosts, the outlaw is Desolation Williams—a name similar to Napoleon
Wilson’s in the earlier film. Williams is an African American outlaw
who leads a small group of criminals accused, though not convicted, of
numerous crimes in the badlands on Mars. The law enforcement officer
is another lieutenant, although Lieutenant Melanie Ballard is neither as
optimistic nor as naive as Lieutenant Bishop. Hardened and experienced,
Ballard is also maintaining an illegal drug habit. She is, in some ways, an
extension of the tough though attractive Hawksian woman, although in
this film she assumes the lead role as hero rather than a secondary part.
As with the Los Angeles of Assault, the principal locations on Mars
resemble dusty frontier towns of the Old West more than gleaming futur-
istic sites. Mars, we are told, is being terra-formed—its atmosphere being

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made more Earth-like—and the primary industry seems to be mining.

The initial plot involves a band of police officers who are sent to transport
the recently arrested Desolation Williams back to the main city for trial.
Williams was arrested for apparently slaughtering the denizens of a bar
and hanging the beheaded victims upside down, although this crime does
not fit with his previous ones. The horrific murders, we later learn, were
actually committed by the growing army of Martian ghosts, who serve
as the primary antagonists.
The Martian ghosts are next in the long line of Carpenter’s mass vil-
lains, and while the leader of the band is distinctive—with long black hair
and tribal facial scars—the majority of the Martian ghosts are anony-
mous. In the story line, the ghosts possess humans when their particles
are breathed in. The possessed humans then begin deforming themselves
with cuts and piercings and take on a kind of primitive tribal dress. A
growing number of Martian-possessed humans lay siege to the small
mining town, and soon the remaining law enforcement officers must band
together with Williams and his gang to battle for survival. The motivation
of the Martian ghosts is unclear, though one of the protagonists makes the
stakes plain: “This is about one thing—dominion.” The explicit allusion to
the frontier struggle makes the politics of Ghosts complicated. It would
have been easy to cast the human settlers as purely innocent victims of the
horrific Martian possession and subsequent attacks, but the humans are
not an especially sympathetic group. As the officers encounter the empty
mining town where much of the action will take place, Ballard exclaims,
“Friday night, the place should be packed. I mean, a whole twelve hours
before sunup and there’s money to burn, whores to fuck, and drugs to
take.” The uncovering of the Martian tomb is not the result of a purely
scientific exploration but mainly due to massive strip-mining taking place
on the planet’s surface. As with Dark Star, one senses a future dominated
by corporate and colonialist greed.
The ending of Ghosts adds to the film’s political ambivalence. After the
siege, the survivors begin heading out of town on a train—another trope
from the classic Western—but turn back when they realize how quickly
the Martians will spread. The problem is that killing a Martian-possessed
human simply releases the Martian spirit to possess someone else. A plan
is devised to blow up a nearby nuclear power plant with the hopes that
the ensuing explosion will incinerate the Martian ghosts as well as their
human hosts. The plan seems to work, and Ballard and Williams, the last
survivors, make their escape on the retreating train. The plot, throughout
the film, has largely been recounted by Ballard, who, having survived the

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siege, tells her story to a legal tribunal of the Matronage—an interesting

extension of the Hawksian woman in which patriarchy is replaced by
matriarchy. But, as Ballard rests after concluding her tale to the tribunal,
alarm bells sound and Desolation Williams appears. Handing her a gun,
he explains, “Come on. Tide is up, it’s time to stay alive.” The two walk
out prepared for the final conflict. “Let’s just kick some ass,” Williams
says. “It’s what we do best,” Ballard replies.
In his analysis of the film, Tom Whalen notes that the ambivalent end-
ing of Ghosts of Mars refuses to give us simple answers. It seems unlikely
that Ballard and Williams can survive—at least as humans—against the
invading army of Martians. It is also unclear which side—the human
miners or the raging army of bloodthirsty Martians—represents us. In a
post-9/11 world, the militaristic cries for revenge and “taking back what is
ours” resonated deeply with the American psyche in the months after the
August 24, 2001, premiere of Ghosts. As Whalen puts it, “The Martians
are back and they’re us, or at least a part of us.” 4 What does seem clear is
that the cycle of violence and dominion seems doomed to repeat itself.
The frontiers we seek to push back, dominate, and civilize will always be
undermined by the past that we seek to repress.
Where Ghosts seems typical of Carpenter’s broader body of work, it
is interesting that his most popular and influential film, Halloween, is in
many ways his most atypical. It is, for example, the only “slasher” film he
has directed and the only one with a solitary female protagonist. In spite
of these important distinctions, however, there are elements in Hallow-
een that bear his familiar trademarks. The film makes heavy use of the
point-of-view shot that allows Carpenter to restrict the scope of our vision
and remind us how limited our perspective is.5 It also utilizes a variation
on the siege motif as the murderous Michael Myers pursues Laurie, the
protagonist and his target, within familiar suburban homes and she must
guess—as must we—where the villain is going to pop up next. In one of
the more harrowing scenes near the film’s ending, Laurie locks herself
in a closet, and we occupy this space with her as Michael batters his way
through the door, a dramatic visual depiction of the site of siege.
On a more substantive level, the upscale suburban town of Haddonfield
can also be considered a kind of desolate frontier. While it is no urban
ghetto or barren wasteland, what is notable about Haddonfield is that it
is a kind of “teenage wasteland.” The young people who become Michael’s
targets exist in a world largely devoid of parents, and indeed, the night of
Michael’s first murder—shown in the highly effective first-person point-
of-view sequence that opens the film—happens as his parents are away

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and he is left in the care of his negligent sister, who becomes his first
victim. When Michael returns to Haddonfield, fifteen years later, the
young people of the town are still largely unsupervised, and the lack of
adult intervention, let alone effective intervention, is notable. In this way,
Haddonfield represents the broader sense of American suburbia as a place
in which the American family had begun to disintegrate. This sense of
isolation in the suburbs is demonstrated as Dr. Loomis, Michael’s doc-
tor at the asylum, presents his fears about Michael’s return to the local
police chief. The chief responds by explaining the nature of the town:
“Doctor, do you know what Haddonfield is? Families, children all lined
up in rows up and down these streets. You’re telling me they’re lined up
for a slaughterhouse.”

The murderous Michael Myers invades the suburban homes of Haddon-

field in Carpenter’s Halloween. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).
The broader sense of desolation is underscored by very real isolation.
In one of the more telling and chilling sequences in the film, Laurie flees
the killer down the street of her neighborhood. Her cries, however, are
ignored, and one of the neighbors can be seen pulling the shades and lock-
ing the door. Suburbia, designed to maximize privacy with its lack of front
porches and its high fences, is not a place to look for communal support.
One question that remains unanswered is why Laurie becomes Mi-
chael’s main target. In many of Carpenter’s other films, the introduction

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of evil forces is caused by some earlier action—the murder of the lepers

in The Fog, the opening of the Martian crypt in Ghosts of Mars—and in
one of the numerous sequels to Halloween, the connection is explained
as familial: Laurie was Michael’s other sister given up for adoption after
the initial murder. This explanation, however, is nowhere in the original
film—which is the only one of the Halloween movies that Carpenter di-
rected—and so the question remains. Careful attention to the film reveals
that the cause of Laurie’s peril lies in her willingness to cross a forbidden
threshold. Walking her young charge Tommy to school, Laurie steps to-
ward the Myer house, now abandoned and desolate. Tommy warns her,
“You’re not supposed to go up there. . . . That’s the spook house.” Laurie
dismisses the warning and steps boldly onto the porch to drop the keys
off for her real estate father. “Just watch,” she boasts, and it is immediately
after this statement that we shift point of view and see Laurie from inside
the house. The menacing figure of Michael steps into our line of view
(another example of figures crossing into our frame of viewing). Tommy
again warns Laurie, “Lonnie Elam said never to go up there. Lonnie Elam
said that’s a haunted house. He said awful stuff happened there once.”
But Laurie does not listen to these childish warnings and sends Tommy
off to school. As she walks on her own way to the high school, she sings
to herself, “I wish I had you all alone, just the two of us,” and again we
see her from a distance. At this point, Michael steps into our view. The
act of crossing the threshold of the forbidden and tragic Myers house has
brought Laurie under Michael’s murderous gaze, and the remainder of
the film involves her efforts to survive the evil that she has unleashed.
In Halloween, Michael is not merely a crazed killer but is depicted as a
kind of cosmic force. As Laurie sits in class in a scene almost immediately
after her breaching of the Myers threshold, we overhear the teacher ex-
plaining that in their literary text, fate is personified (“Fate is immovable
like a mountain”), and it is clear that Laurie has provoked her personified
fate. Michael’s supernatural quality is also evidenced in the film’s shock-
ing ending in which Michael, after being shot six times by Dr. Loomis,
mysteriously disappears. A battered Laurie asks the doctor, “It was the
boogeyman?” He replies, “As a matter of fact, it was.” In Carpenter’s work,
the forbidden threshold is often wrapped up in cosmic forces of evil. The
breaching of the hidden chamber in the church wall in The Fog and of the
entry into the Martian tomb in Ghosts of Mars both entail an unleashing
of a supernatural force, just as Laurie’s step onto the Myers house does.
Interestingly, these forces typically emerge as mirror opposites of
the protagonists—almost psychic doppelgängers. In The Fog, the greedy

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citizens of Antonio Bay are confronted by vengeful spirits who are ap-
peased only when their gold is returned, and in Ghosts, the conquering
settlers of Mars are met by the spirits of an earlier Martian civilization.
In Halloween, the forces play out not along the lines of colonialism and
capitalism but around sex and sexuality. As numerous commentators
have observed, both Michael and Laurie are sexual misfits, stunted and
immature. In what would become a staple of slasher films, the sexually
confused killer battles with the virginal “Final Girl.”6 In all cases, whether
colonial or sexual, the key moment is the crossing of the forbidden thresh-
old and the release of forces that seek to unsettle the present and confront
our protagonists with the crimes of the past.
The release of a cosmic force of evil is also at the heart of Carpenter’s
1987 film, Prince of Darkness. As with most of the films considered thus
far, much of the plot of Prince of Darkness involves a small group of
people held under siege, this time inside a crumbling and isolated inner-
city church. This group consists of scientists and graduate students who
have been brought in by the Catholic church to investigate a strange relic.
By translating an ancient book found near the relic, they learn that the
green and swirling viscous matter contained in the vessel is Satan, son
of an ancient “Anti-God.” When God decided to banish the Anti-God to
the dark side, Satan was buried by his father to await a chance to open
a portal and allow for the ancient god’s return. The reactivated matter
contained within the relic soon begins to influence events in the outside
world, and the researchers and the accompanying priest become trapped
inside the church, besieged by an army of homeless people whose minds
have been taken over by Satan.
In spite of its urban setting, the church is both desolate and isolated.
The area surrounding it is clearly a slum, and the relatively empty streets
are littered with trash. The only pedestrians seen in the area are the
homeless, who are soon turned into minions for the evil force within
the church. As the siege ensues, those inside find themselves trapped by
the hordes of homeless, and the two who try to escape are killed. Those
remaining inside the church, however, also face dangers. The liquid inside
the vessel leaks out and possesses one of the scientists, who begins the
process of possessing others. Soon the group is divided between those
who are possessed and those who seek both to survive and to stop the
impending return of the Anti-God.
Clearly, the core elements of Prince fit along lines established in other
Carpenter films: the isolated and desolate setting, the small band of sur-
vivors besieged by unnatural perils, and the imminent return of some

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ancient evil (at times alien and at times supernatural). Prince also demon-
strates Carpenter’s interest in forbidden thresholds. It is the entry of the
group into the church that not only puts them in peril but also unwittingly
allows Satan’s plans to unfold. Were it not for the number of potential
human hosts, it is unclear how the imprisoned Satan could manipulate
events to free himself and then open the portal for the return of his father,
the Anti-God. Another play on the notion of thresholds is the clever way
Carpenter crafts this portal for the return of this ancient god through
mirrors. The Anti-God has been banished into the realm of anti-matter,
and so Satan—having possessed one of the female scientists—utilizes a
large mirror as the doorway. When Satan reaches out, the surface of the
mirror becomes watery, and as Satan’s/the scientist’s fingers penetrate
the glass, Carpenter shows the mirror to be a dividing line between light
and darkness. In the film’s climactic scene, as Satan reaches through the
mirror, a hoof-like hand meets Satan’s hand. The two hands grasp, and
Satan begins pulling the Anti-God through the mirror. At this moment,
the female protagonist, Catherine, throws herself at Satan, and both go
hurtling through the mirror and into the utter blackness along with the
monstrous Anti-God. The priest then smashes the mirror with an ax, and
the threat of the Anti-God is apparently ended. Here again Carpenter
utilizes an individual sacrifice to resolve the threat. Like Alan in Village
of the Damned and MacReady in The Thing, self-sacrifice is required to
seal the threshold between our world and the threat that lies beyond.
As with other Carpenter films, Prince of Darkness demonstrates the
logic of the frontier in reverse, and the church becomes the battleground
for our current civilization and the ancient force of pure evil that seeks to
return and reclaim its place in our universe. Carpenter reveals this danger
in one of the most effective sequences in the film. As those within the
church fall asleep, they share the same dream: a grainy video broadcast
with a distorted voice warning them that what they are seeing is real
and is being beamed back through time. The initial version of the video
shows the exterior of the church, and as the camera repositions, we see a
large dark figure emerging through the doorway. This then is the literal
emergence of evil through the forbidden threshold and into our world.
“Beaming from the year 1, 9, 9, 9,” the broadcast signal reveals the danger-
ous potential future in which the boundary between our world and the
evil realm of the Anti-God collapses. This is a theological sense of the
recolonization of the desolate frontier, one in which primordial forces of
evil return to reclaim the earth from which they were banished. A band of
future scientists broadcast this signal backward in time in the desperate

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hope that someone in the past—the filmic present—can seal the breach
and prevent this apocalyptic ending.
Catherine’s sacrifice—literally throwing herself into the black abyss
of what must be hell—seals the portal, but in classic Carpenter fash-
ion, it is unclear how permanent this seal will be. In the film’s epilogue,
Brian—Catherine’s lover and the primary protagonist—dreams of the
same grainy video broadcast with the same distorted voiceover, but as the
camera reveals the church’s opening, it is Catherine, pale and expression-
less, who emerges as the malevolent threat in our future. Awaking with a
start, he steps to his large bedroom mirror and slowly reaches toward it.
The film ends mere seconds before his fingers touch its surface.
The end of the world as we know it is also the subject of Carpenter’s
In the Mouth of Madness (1995)—the third in what Carpenter has called
his “end-of-the-world” trilogy, which also includes The Thing and Prince
of Darkness.7 In this film, the central conceit—which is in some ways
reminiscent of Wes Craven—is that a horror writer’s books are driving
people insane and, ultimately, transforming humans into hideous mon-
sters. These transformations are meant to open a portal through which
ancient and horrific gods may reemerge. The plot owes a great debt to
the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and it seems clear that the film’s author,
Sutter Cane, is a kind of stand-in for Lovecraft, although with the mass
popularity enjoyed by Stephen King.
The protagonist of In the Mouth is an insurance investigator named
John Trent who is renowned for his ability to “sniff out a con.” He is
brought in when Sutter Cane goes missing, along with his new man-
uscript, and Cane’s publisher seeks to collect on an insurance policy
against his death. During Trent’s search, a series of riots occurs related
to the publication of another Cane novel and news reports surface that
his novels are driving people insane. Carefully examining the cover art
of Cane’s six novels, Trent realizes that the illustrations can be turned
into a jigsaw puzzle that forms the shape of New Hampshire, and a red
dot in the artwork represents the location of Cane’s fictional town of
Hobb’s End and, potentially, Cane himself. Once again, the threshold
between our world and the invading forces that lurk outside is located
in an isolated place. When the publisher objects that there is no town on
any map named Hobb’s End, Trent reminds him that there are “plenty
of forgotten towns across America.”
Trent eventually travels to the fictional town of Hobb’s End along with
Cane’s editor, Styles. Surrounded by blackness as they drive at night, the
two pass through a strange tunnel of lights and metal that transforms into

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a wooden bridge, and suddenly they find themselves in Hobb’s End, which
they discover is exactly as Cane had depicted it, down to paintings on the
wall and a creaky board in the town’s inn. Trent becomes wrapped up in
the mysterious and now “real” events in the town and eventually comes
face to face with Cane, who explains the ultimate point of his work: as
people believe in his fictional world, it becomes real and opens a portal for
the exiled old gods to return. As Cane explains, “All those horrible, slimy
things [are] waiting to get back in.” Cane later gives Trent the finished
manuscript to the novel In the Mouth of Madness and explains that Trent
too is a fictional character created by Cane; his job is to “take the manu-
script to the world.” Fleeing with the manuscript through a long passage
and pursued by the deformed and horrific old gods, Trent stumbles back
into the “real” world, where he tries to destroy the manuscript. When he
goes to confront the publisher about the manuscript he has burned, the
publisher explains that Trent “delivered it to me months ago” and that it
is already being published with a movie soon to follow.
The twisting of reality sends Trent over the edge, and he is sent to an
asylum, where he is interviewed by a psychiatrist seeking to understand
the growing violent hysteria surrounding Cane’s book. This interview
ends the film, and in the final segment Trent explains that he does not
want to be freed because his padded cell is the safest place left. When
asked why people are turning violently insane, Trent calmly explains:
“Every species can smell its own extinction. Last ones left don’t have a
pretty time of it.” The old gods’ return marks the end of the human race,
which will become a myth. Unlike the ambivalent endings of Carpenter’s
other apocalyptic films, In the Mouth makes clear that the resettlement
of our world is completed. As riots explode, Trent leaves his padded cell
and wanders into town where the film of In the Mouth of Madness is play-
ing. He takes a seat in the empty theater and literally watches himself in
various scenes as he laughs hysterically.
As with Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth also details a kind of onto-
logical frontier. At the edges of our conception of reality lie ancient forces
that have been displaced by our beliefs, but in both cases those ancient
forces await an opportunity, a portal through which to return.8 In both
films, the key to the unfolding plot is a forbidden place—the crumbling
church, the fictional Hobb’s End—and once the protagonists have broken
the threshold of these places, they unleash the dark forces from the past
waiting within.

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 9
Drifters in Desolation: Big Trouble in Little China, Vampires,
They Live, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A.

Jack Burton, the protagonist of Big Trouble in Little China, faces a cru-
cial moment of decision: Burton is driving with his friend Wang as they
pursue gang members who have kidnapped Wang’s fiancée, and as the
pursuit winds its way into San Francisco’s Chinatown, it is clear that the
kidnappers are heading to their home turf. As they reach the point of no
return, Wang says to Burton, “I can’t ask you to . . . ,” but Burton cuts
him off abruptly: “Where is it!” Approaching the crucial turn, Wang tells
Burton to head down a small, winding alley and shouts, “Lords of Death
down that alley!” While Wang is invoking the name of the gang the two
men pursue, it is also clear that he is signaling the very real possibility of
death awaiting them. Burton screeches the truck into a turn, and soon the
men become embroiled in an adventure that involves not only the kidnap-
ping gang members but Chinese black magic, ancient demons, thunder
gods, and monstrous creatures lurking below the surface of the earth.
That Burton faces these mysterious and supernatural forces with little
hesitation and no loss of bravado is a mark that he is a drifter-hero. The
drifter-hero is an archetype in American literature and film derived from
the cowboy and outlaw and is almost always a male.1 A loner who drifts
into town often at the precise moment when trouble seems inevitable,
he is a wild card thrown into the mix, and his presence serves to tip the
balance in the struggle taking place because of his skill in masculine
activities like fighting and drinking. While he is a natural leader, he will
avoid becoming entangled with the group of people he assists. As Robert

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Athearn notes, he is a “hero because of his individualistic, free-roaming

ways,” and for this reason, while he may develop romantic feelings or
bonds of friendship, in the end he will drift away, just as he came.2 The
drifter-hero is a denizen of the frontier and is one of the few figures
capable of navigating this uncertain and dangerous realm, and as such,
Carpenter’s heroes often fall within this category. Several of the films
already considered contain versions of the drifter-hero, notably Napo-
leon Wilson in Assault on Precinct 13 and Desolation Williams in Ghosts
of Mars, but in this section I explore the specific dimensions of four of
Carpenter’s most prominent drifter-heroes.
Big Trouble’s Jack Burton is a classic example of the drifter-hero, so
much so that he almost comes across as a caricature in Carpenter’s light-
hearted action film. Burton is a truck driver who is first seen spouting
aphorisms and stories about himself on his CB radio while driving through
a raging storm; it is notable that we consistently see him engaged in long-
winded monologues instead of dialogues. He and Wang become involved
after a long night of gambling and drinking. Deeply in Jack’s debt from los-
ing at cards, Wang asks to gather funds at the restaurant he owns, and Jack
agrees to drive him to pick up the money. A detour to the airport to pick
up Wang’s fiancée begins the adventure that occupies the rest of the film.
Jack is apparently skilled in combat, although the comedic nature of
the film sees him bumbling his way out of a number of skirmishes. At one
point, he struggles to unsheathe the knife buckled into his boot, leaping
into battle only after it is finished; in another scene, he fires his gun into
the air only to dislodge rocks that fall and knock him unconscious. Still, it
is Burton who defeats the film’s primary enemy—Lo Pan, an ancient spirit
who becomes flesh just in time for Burton to kill him and end the threat.
Burton is also a drifter through an area that is not his own, and it
is this point that contributes an important dimension to Carpenter’s
desolate frontier. Chinatown, as represented in Big Trouble, is a mysteri-
ous and wild place where ancient gods and magic still course beneath
the modern city streets. As the heroes prepare their final assault on
Lo Pan’s fortress, they travel in subterranean caverns filled with magi-
cal creatures. When Burton asks where they are, Egg Shen, a Chinese
sorcerer who operates a tour bus by day, answers, “Nowhere.” In some
ways, Burton’s disorientation mirrors that of the American white male
who can find himself surrounded by cultures that seem alien and for-
eign while still within America.3 As Burton exclaims in the midst of the
magic and creatures, “I’m a reasonable guy. I’ve just experienced some very

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unreasonable things.” The Chinese mythology arising on and under

the streets of San Francisco, however, does not bother Burton. As the
archetypal drifter-hero, he is used to strange events engulfing him. As
he explains during one of his CB monologues: “When some wild-eyed,
eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head
up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and
he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back
in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time
like that: ‘Have ya paid your dues, Jack?’ ‘Yessir, the check is in the mail.’”
As a drifter-hero, Burton is unflappable, and his bravado becomes his
greatest asset in facing down powers and creatures beyond his imagin-
ing. His loyalty to Wang draws him deep into mysteries he cannot fully
comprehend, and even with his ignorance he typically assumes a leader-
ship role, giving orders and hatching schemes. In spite of this bond of
affection with Wang and the growing romantic attraction between him
and one of the female protagonists, Gracie, it is Burton’s destiny to move
on. As he leaves to return to his truck and the open road, however, he
recognizes the magnitude of their accomplishments—defeating ancient
demons and saving the world from domination. Turning to Wang, he
quietly says, “We shook the pillars of heaven, didn’t we, Wang?” This
accomplishment is enough, and the film closes with Burton back in his
big rig, loudly proclaiming aphorisms on his CB radio—although the final
shot reveals one of the hairy Chinese demons crawling up the back of his
truck, suggesting that Burton’s “big trouble” is not yet over.
If Jack Burton is the lighthearted face of the drifter-hero, then Jack
Crow, the protagonist of John Carpenter’s Vampires, is his dark and more
cynical opposite. Vampires is an angry and grim film, and the men who
occupy it are brutally masculine, misogynistic, and cruel. Like Assault on
Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars, Vampires is another pseudo-Western but
this time wrapped around a classic horror film. As Stacey Abbott notes,
“In Vampires, John Carpenter has deliberately approached his film as a
vampire western through its New Mexican desert landscape and cita-
tions in plot, character and style of such notable western filmmakers as
Howard Hawks, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah.” 4 Indeed, Peckinpah
is Carpenter’s clearest inspiration here, and Carpenter himself has even
explained the film as “The Wild Bunch meets Vlad the Impaler.”5
Peckinpah’s influence is clear in Vampires. The drifter-heroes here
inhabit a rough frontier where the normal measures of law and order are
either absent or corrupted. Carpenter’s film, for example, begins with

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Crow and his group of vampire hunters descending on an abandoned

and decaying farm in the middle of the desolate New Mexico desert.
In the opening moments, we watch them systematically and savagely
invade the house and kill the “nesting” vampires, skewering them with
arrows attached to towlines that then pull the undead creatures out into
the sunshine, where they burst into flames. As in The Wild Bunch, these
are brutal mercenaries operating for profit in a dangerous landscape, and
as with Peckinpah’s heroes, these men are intensely masculine. If their
hypermasculinity was not made obvious enough in the brutal killing of
vampires in the film’s opening sequence, then their celebration after-
ward drives the point home. Returning to the isolated motel they have
appropriated, the men drink and cavort with prostitutes as the paid-off
local sheriff only watches.
The men’s arrogance undoes them. In their assault on the farmhouse,
they failed to find the “master vampire,” and this powerful figure—whom
we later learn is the original vampire, Valek—comes to the motel to seek
vengeance. While Crow takes one of the prostitutes to his room, Valek
descends upon the men in the other room and brutally murders them, cut-
ting one man in half with his clawlike hands. Crow and his second-in-com-
mand, Montoya, escape along with one of the prostitutes, Katrina, who
was bitten by Valek. As the vampire hunters explain, the bitten Katrina
will become a psychic link to Valek, allowing them to track the monster.
The sequences that follow seem to revel in a misogynistic version of
masculinity as the two men, Crow and Montoya, slap and push the dete-
riorating Katrina. Montoya frankly explains the situation to the tied-up
woman: “Don’t fuck with me, honey! I’ll snap your neck like a twig. . . .
You’ve been bitten by a vampire. Do you remember the party back at the
motel? Big guy, pointy teeth, real shitty breath? Don’t worry, it’ll all come
back soon. A master vampire has a telepathic link to his victims, and
you’re gonna help us find him. And while he’s sleeping, we unleash on
his ass. You’re the bait, honey, sorry.” Such antagonism toward women,
and indeed for everyone who is not among his tight group, accentuates
the negative side of the drifter-hero’s intense individualism.6 Montoya,
in an improbable series of events, is bitten by Katrina and also falls in
love with her. In contrast, Crow is revealed to be the real drifter-hero,
remaining true to his calling and avoiding the temptations of domesticity
and romantic love. At the film’s conclusion, after Valek and the remaining
vampires have been killed, Montoya seeks to make his getaway with the
now fully transformed Katrina. Crow recites one of the gang’s founding
rules: “Rule Number One: If your partner is ever bitten by a vampire,

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never, ever let him live.” Loyalty to his friend, however, forces Crow to
let Montoya and Katrina make a break for it, but Crow assures his former
colleague, “Wherever you go, I will find you. I will hunt you down, and I
will kill you—the girl, too.” The two embrace, and then Montoya makes
his getaway. The male bond is compromised by feminine sexuality, and
in this way the brotherhood of the gang is fractured.
Crow may claim to live by a code, but he is consistently portrayed as
crude and vulgar with no respect for authority, and while he works for
the church, his actions show no moral limits. He beats a young priest, for
instance, to extract needed information and shows no concerns about
using the prostitute Katrina as bait. In the end, however, the film suggests
that Crow is precisely the kind of man who can survive in the savagely
desolate frontier in which ancient vampires seek to return and dominate.
The film’s plot involves Valek’s efforts to secure a certain religious relic
that will allow vampires to live during the day, thus becoming virtually
invincible. Crow’s success in defeating Valek turns back this invasion and
once again, at least temporarily, secures the safety of humanity. John H.
Lenihan’s description of Peckinpah’s films fits the underlying ethos of
Carpenter’s Vampires: a “prevailing violence that underlies the freedom-
loving Westerner, and in more horrific ways, civilization.”7
Both Jack Burton and Jack Crow are experienced drifter-heroes by the
time their respective narratives begin. Carpenter’s other great drifter-
hero, Snake Plissken, is also already infamous by the time we see him
onscreen. But before we turn to Plissken, it will be useful to explore the
one film of Carpenter’s in which we can see the processes by which a
drifter becomes a drifter-hero, his 1988 They Live.
In classic Western fashion, the drifter-hero of They Live does not have
a name, although he is listed in the credits as Nada. We first see Nada as
he wanders across railroad tracks at the edge of a large city. He wears a
heavy pack on his back, and his clothes are dirty. He makes his way down
littered streets filled with apparently homeless people before finding the
local unemployment office. Here he explains that he is from Denver but
the jobs disappeared and the banks were closing. The response at the
unemployment office is less than sympathetic, and Nada finds himself
again wandering the streets before finding work at a construction site
where his considerable brawn—Nada is played by professional wrestler
Roddy Piper—is put to use digging trenches. It is here that Nada befriends
Frank, another drifter seeking to make enough money to support his
family back in Detroit, and it is Frank who brings Nada to the tent city
of the homeless, where the film’s plot advances.

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At the homeless shelter, Nada discovers a resistance movement that

is fighting an unseen alien colonization of earth. By looking through
specially made glasses, Nada sees through the alien illusion and finds that
billboards and magazines contain subliminal messages like “obey,” “no
independent thought,” and “watch tv.” He also can see that some
“humans” are actually hideous aliens, and these aliens, we later learn, are
a group of venture capitalists who are exploiting the earth’s resources for
personal gains. Nada and later Frank join up with the resistance, and it
is this struggle that drives the majority of the film.

The alien illusion is stripped away in Carpenter’s They Live. Courtesy of Brit-
ish Film Institute (BFI).

Considered in relation to the broader frontier mythology that under-

girds most of Carpenter’s narratives, Nada is an excellent example of what
R. W. B. Lewis has called the “American Adam,” an iconic American hero
tied into the mythology of the “undiscovered” frontiers of America as a
new Eden giving birth to a new American “race.” As with Lewis’s descrip-
tion of this early American literary figure, Nada is “an individual standing
alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited
him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.”8 He arrives
in the new city with nothing but a pack containing his tools. His inno-
cence is palpable as he refutes Frank’s anger at the American system: “I
believe in America,” he tells Frank. “I follow the rules.” Nada’s belief that

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he can “follow the rules” and prosper is fundamentally challenged as he

learns the way the system really works—with aliens broadcasting sedating
messages to a population of humans being domesticated for exploitation.
Nada’s disillusionment is also part of the core myth of the American
Adam. Mark Busby observes that in classic literature, as the Adamic figure
enters into the wild frontier, “events challenge the reality of the charac-
ter’s illusions, and often some form of captivity or attempted escape from
captivity causes the transformation. As a result, the character’s illusions
are challenged, and he is forced toward experience or knowledge.”9 In
Nada’s case, the challenge comes first in the violent police assault on the
homeless encampment and the still-secret resistance movement contained
within. The homeless community, it is worth noting, is portrayed in the
film’s early moments as a idyllic communal setting with safety, free food,
and various people helping each other. The police assault forces Nada and
his friends to flee, and it is after this attack that Nada determines to go
back to the shelter and discern the root of the problem. Earlier in the film,
Nada had slipped into the Episcopal church that housed the resistance and
discovered hidden boxes. After the assault, Nada returns and steals one
of the boxes, and when he discovers dozens of sunglasses, he eventually
puts a pair on. The glasses bypass the alien technology and cut through
the illusion, and now Nada is forced to reconcile himself to the reality of
the world in which he lives.10
Disillusionment is part of the process by which the innocent American
Adam becomes the kind of drifter-hero more evident in classical West-
erns, like the difference between the innocent farmer Joe Starrett and
the hardened gunman Shane in George Stevens’s legendary 1953 West-
ern Shane. Shane is a drifter-hero precisely because he has already been
disillusioned, and Joe Starrett is a good father and husband precisely
because he has not been disillusioned. The drifter-hero is independent
and disconnected from the bonds of family or kin, which is why Jack
Burton ignores the romantic overtures of Gracie at the end of Big Trouble
and chooses to again take to the open road alone. The drifter-hero is also
a man of experience who has seen through the illusions of society and
uses this hard-won wisdom to outmaneuver his enemies. The process
of disillusionment, however, is not easy or pleasant. As Nada grasps his
newly found knowledge, he recoils from the hideous aliens posing as
humans. His open disgust alerts the alien invaders; as one hisses into
a secret microphone, “I’ve got one who can see.” Soon two alien police
officers arrive to arrest Nada, but he overcomes them and kills them both.
Arming himself with their weapons, Nada strolls into a local bank and

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exclaims boldly, “I have come to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m
all out of bubblegum,” whereupon he begins shooting the disguised aliens
among the patrons and workers. The outburst of violence entails what
Lewis calls a “furious disillusion,” and it is at this point that Nada takes on
the traditional mantle of the gun-wielding, tough-talking drifter-hero.11
In a pattern established in films like The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and
Village of the Damned, Nada’s ultimate triumph requires self-sacrifice.
Having breached the building containing the transmitter that sends out
the alien illusion-signal, Nada, Frank, and Nada’s love interest, Holly,
make their way to the roof to destroy the device. On the way, Holly reveals
herself as a collaborator with the aliens when she kills Frank and then
prepares to shoot Nada.12 Demonstrating his newly acquired brutality,
Nada shoots her, and just before he is killed in a hail of alien/police bul-
lets, he manages to destroy the transmitter. The film ends as the aliens
are revealed and the real humans recoil from the horrific creatures living
in their midst. Nada’s sacrifice has ripped back the curtain of illusion,
opening the possibility of a new beginning for the human race.13
Of the Carpenter films considered up to this point, They Live is the
most overtly political. Clearly, there is a politics in Carpenter’s construc-
tion of the desolate frontier as a space in which civilization, often syn-
onymous with American culture, is in retreat and our literal and cultural
space is being reclaimed by other, often ancient, forces. While They Live
follows this general thematic, it is also pointed in its use of the desolate
frontier and the disillusioning of Nada as a critique of American culture
in the era of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s influence on American culture can
hardly be overstated, and his “back to the good old days” appeal struck a
nerve in Americans who were still reeling from the traumas of Vietnam,
Watergate, and domestic upheavals. America in the 1980s—and in many
ways, the subsequent decades—has been defined by what Gil Troy calls
“Reagan’s prosperity-filled, budget-busting, government-bashing, nation-
building, image-making, morale-boosting, flag-waving, cold war–ending
eight years.”14 Reagan’s optimism was seemingly unfailing, and as Richard
Jensen observes, “Even in the most difficult periods in his administration,
Reagan would always find a reason for hope in a better future.”15
The shining optimism of Reagan’s rhetoric is parodied in They Live. As
Nada watches a television host—whom he can now see as an ugly alien—
the host enthuses, “It’s a new morning in America . . . fresh, vital. The old
cynicism is gone. We have faith in our leaders. We’re optimistic as to what
becomes of it all. It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don’t
need pessimism. There are no limits.” One of Reagan’s election slogans had

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been “It’s morning in America again,” but the critique of Reagan in the film
does not end with the president’s optimism. Reagan’s primary economic
philosophy involved what was called “trickle-down economics,” which,
as Amos Kiewe and Davis Houck describe it, “exhibited strong biases for
the wealthy, particularly for the wealthy to generate additional wealth that
would trickle down to the lowest on the economic ladder,” and it is this
philosophy that bears the brunt of Carpenter’s critical vision.16 The alien
invaders occupy the wealthiest positions, and their mission is to systemati-
cally domesticate and exploit the lower classes. The illegal messages the
resistance sends out in pirate transmissions could be aimed at either the
real president’s policies or the fictional aliens: “The poor and the under-
class are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They
have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices.”
Through the events of the film, Nada undergoes disillusionment with
the American promise that hard work and obedient behavior will lead
to prosperity, and in the process he opens his eyes to the economic and
political injustices of his world. In the end he sacrifices himself, ignoring
the prospect of becoming a collaborator with the alien invaders, in an
attempt to share his disillusionment with the wider culture. This hope
of stripping away the illusions of civilized life, although still unfulfilled
by the film’s end, is deeply rooted in the frontier mythology. The Ameri-
can Adam seeks in the wild and untamed edges of society a new space
in which to re-create himself and the world around him. This is Nada’s
hope as he destroys the alien transmitter.
In some ways, Nada is typical of the drifter-heroes who have occupied
many of Carpenter’s films, but in other ways, he is unique. Nada is, for
instance, the only drifter-hero whom we see develop into his role, and in
this way he is virtually the only “American Adam” figure in Carpenter’s
oeuvre. Yet, while Nada is disillusioned, he does not lose hope. For oth-
ers—like Burton and Crow—hope has been jaded and lost. Experience
has taught them to hope for nothing more than survival.
There is clearly a kind of political critique at work in these films.17
Just as the frontier myth helped to underwrite the notion of American
exceptionalism—the idea of Americans as a chosen people who were
fulfilling a “God-given” destiny—so too does Carpenter’s reversal of this
myth play out with political implications. Carpenter’s critical politics are
clear in a film like They Live in which the optimistic economic rhetoric
of Ronald Reagan becomes a specific target, but it is also clear in the two
films I consider in the final section of this chapter, Escape from New York
and Escape from L.A.

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Carpenter’s two Escape films are a logical place to conclude this reflec-
tion on his work, especially as they so clearly embody all three elements
discussed so far. In the two films, there are clear sites of siege—New
York and later Los Angeles become cities surrounded by the US Police
Force, and the denizens of each city represent the kind of primitive and
savage forces that mark the frontier myth in retreat. In both films, the
protagonist is Snake Plissken, the epitome of Carpenter’s drifter-hero.
Plissken, played in both films by Kurt Russell, is a decorated war-veteran-
turned-criminal whose exploits have made him legendary as an outlaw
and gunman. There is also a clear forbidden threshold across which Snake
must pass in his quest to retrieve an invaluable object that is necessary
to protect what remains of American society, and it is plain that only he
is capable of completing the mission.
The parallels between the two films make L.A. as much a remake as a
sequel, and in many ways the plots are identical. In New York, the island of
Manhattan has been turned into a maximum-security prison into which
prisoners are placed without the possibility of release. The inmates form
their own savage society, and the police force is encamped around the
island to keep them contained. As the film opens, a revolutionary group
hijacks Air Force One, and the president is forced to eject in an escape pod
into the middle of the prison-city. Plissken, who has been recently arrested
and sentenced to life in Manhattan, seems the only person capable of
secreting into New York and returning the president and, perhaps more
important, a secret audiotape that contains information necessary to end
the long-running war between the United States, Russia, and China. A
reluctant Plissken is pressed into service with tiny explosives lodged in
his neck to be removed only after the mission is complete. Once on the
island, Plissken makes his way through the dangerous city streets, avoid-
ing cannibalistic underground “crazies,” and locates the president, who
is held by the “Duke of New York,” the city’s primary gang lord. With the
aid of an old acquaintance, Plissken manages to retrieve the president and
the audiotape and make it back over the wall. In the end, however, as the
newly rescued president prepares to air the tape for foreign leaders, we
learn that Plissken has switched tapes. An embarrassed president squirms
as “Bandstand Boogie” plays, and Plissken is seen destroying the real tape
as he walks into the distance.
In L.A., Los Angeles has become an island that now serves as a deporta-
tion zone for “undesirable and immoral” citizens who no longer fit in with
the new religiously moral America. This time, the president is a religious
zealot who predicted the earthquake that separated Los Angeles from the

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mainland; his daughter has rebelled and stolen a secret military weapon
capable of destroying electrical devices with an “electro-magnetic pulse.”
She hijacks “Air Force Three” and lands on the island of Los Angeles,
where she takes the weapon to her new lover, a Peruvian terrorist named
Cuervo Jones, who plans to use the weapon to make America vulnerable
to an invasion by third world forces. Again, a newly arrested Plissken is
sent into the island—under threat from a genetic virus this time—where
he must retrieve the device from Jones and return it to the president.
Plissken sneaks onto the island of Los Angeles and must avoid street
gangs and escape from psychotic plastic surgery addicts, who seek to
cannibalize the living for new body parts, in his quest to retrieve a remote
control disk that activates the satellite weapons system. Plissken is again
successful—this time with the assistance of another former associate,
Hershe, and her gang—and he manages to bring the device back to the
mainland. But, as in New York, Plissken has performed a switch. When
the president activates the remote control device—once again during a
live broadcast to leaders of enemy nations—it plays a recorded “map to
the stars.” Plissken has the real device and programs it to strike out at the
entire globe, effectively sending the Earth back to an era before electricity.
He pushes the button and global electrical capacity is destroyed.
Given the virtually identical nature of the plots, the differences in
Carpenter’s New York and L.A. should be informative, and what is most
immediately interesting is the ways in which each city is used to forge a
different framework for the same adventure. In many ways, the intercon-
nection between cinema and city is so great that it is difficult to imagine
one without the other. Historically, the emergence of movie theaters was
a uniquely urban phenomenon, and the experience of film production,
distribution, and viewing was shaped by the modern cities in which they
took place. Our experience of major cities is also deeply cinematic. Who,
for instance, can view the Empire State Building without in some way
framing the view in terms of classical films, whether King Kong (1933) or
An Affair to Remember (1957)?18
More specifically, within the American imagination, New York and Los
Angeles occupy opposing positions. Not only do they represent the geo-
graphic poles of the country—each epitomizing their respective coasts—
but they also represent different frames for understanding the American
experience. New York stands as the first great metropolis and the beginning
of American urban culture. “Within American popular culture, the image
of the city traditionally has expressed the displaced fears and desires of a
society undergoing rapid economic and demographic transformations,”

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writes Steven Alan Carr, and in this regard, “New York City is arguably
the archetypal metropolis.”19 It is also, especially in relation to tales of
Ellis Island, the entry point for many immigrants and thus can be seen
as the starting point for America’s westward frontier expansion.
Contemporary visions of New York—at the time of this writing—have
been largely shaped by the heavy-handed efforts of former mayor Rudolph
Giuliani to enforce law and order in the late 1990s and by the trauma of
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It is worth recalling, however,
that at the time of Carpenter’s 1981 film, New York had a very differ-
ent cultural profile. The “Big Apple” was widely regarded as rotting. The
city’s bankruptcy in the mid-1970s and rising crime rate had made it the
epitome of the “mean streets” of urban America.
Los Angeles, on the other hand, represents that farthest point of west-
ward expansion and, as such, truly stands as the “city of dreams.” Where
New York is viewed as gritty and a source of brutal “reality,” Los Angeles
is understood to be, as Mark Shiel puts it, “a bizarre soup of pulp televi-
sion, soap operas, sitcoms, cartoons, commercials, and infomercials—
anodyne, superficial and lacking in any human meaning.”20 Unlike the
iconic and gridlike structure of Manhattan, Los Angeles is a sprawling
series of neighborhoods and suburbs. Greg Hise, Michael J. Dear, and H.
Eric Schockman note that “postmodern urbanism is about complexity
and difference. These are manifest in Los Angeles as an acute localization
and fragmentation of social process.”21 The cultural and racial diversity of
Los Angeles is also covered with an almost glossy cinematic and televisual
sheen so that whatever the problems of the city, it is widely perceived as
an almost entirely artificial construct—a “city of dreams” indeed. In his
influential reflection on the city, cultural geographer Edward Soja notes,
“With exquisite irony, contemporary Los Angeles has come to resemble
more than ever before a gigantic agglomeration of theme parks, a lifespace
composed of Disneyworlds.”22
The divergent cultural connotations also play out in the films. Escape
from New York is a grittier film, and its violence is tied into the cultural
mythos of its setting—crazy underground dwellers, violent street gangs,
and largely run by criminals. The dangers to Plissken seem real and the
criminals are more primitive, using crossbows and clubs rather than
guns. There is also a kind of claustrophobic tone in the film as Plissken
wanders down largely empty streets and narrow alleyways, dangers
always lurking in the shadows.
Escape from L.A., on the other hand, plays out with a much lighter
tone. There are criminals and street gangs, but they are armed to the

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teeth with automatic weapons. “Gang bangers” drive down the deserted
freeways firing indiscriminately at each other, and the Sunset Strip has
become a crowded bazaar complete with a parade headed by the film’s
primary villain.
In my reading, both films take up cultural fears raised by the Reagan
revolution and offer a grim picture of the prospects of moving forward.
Released in 1981, New York captures the early rhetoric of the Reagan
campaign with a particular focus on Cold War histrionics and fears
of internal corruption and crime. Reagan first rose to political promi-
nence in the 1966 gubernatorial election with the promise of restoring
“law and order” to riot-plagued California.23 He was also notable for
his insistence on increased military funding and taking a hard line in
America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. Fear of criminal corruption
from within and hostile forces from without echoes in New York. The
premise of the film is that a dramatic increase in the crime rate resulted
in the island of Manhattan being transformed into a massive penal colony
into which criminals were permanently imprisoned. While this conceit
clearly reflects the Reagan-era fears of crime out of control and concern
for “being soft” on criminals, the hard line taken by the government is not
held up in New York as laudable. The film’s critique of the government’s
draconian measures is made evident in an early, ironic sequence as the
camera pans along the wall of one of the police stations, designated “Lib-
erty Island Security Control.” Criminals being processed for transport
onto the island are given the option of “immediate termination,” and
prisoners seeking to escape on a small raft are literally blown out of the
water by a helicopter gunship.
The crumbling penitentiary of New York is a kind of desolate space
on the outskirts of futuristic America. As the warden, Hauk, prepares
to send Plissken in, he explains to him, “I’m ready to kick your ass out
of the world.” The space of Manhattan has been literally transformed
into a non-place but one that retains the cultural connotations of New
York—a space of anarchy, crime, and persistent danger. Those within the
city are not presented as any more noble than the government that has
imprisoned them. The Duke of New York, an imposing African American
gang lord played by Isaac Hayes, is a ruthless dictator who plans to use
the kidnapped president to negotiate the release of all the city’s prisoners.
The ruthlessness of the Duke and the denizens of New York is revealed
after Plissken is temporarily captured. Led into the center of Grand Cen-
tral Station, Plissken finds a boxing ring, where he is forced to fight an
enormous man in a gladiatorial battle using baseball bats.

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Snake Plissken enters the desolate wasteland of New York in Carpenter’s

Escape from New York. Courtesy of British Film Institute (BFI).
Escape from L.A. arrived in theaters eight years after the end of Rea-
gan’s second term, and several elements of the film connect to more
recent occurrences. In 1992, Los Angeles suffered through a period of
rioting driven largely by racial unrest provoked by the acquittal of white
police officers who had been videotaped beating an unarmed African
American named Rodney King. The violence of the riots underscored
the long history of racial tensions and accusations of police brutality.
The film also incorporates the relatively contemporary earthquake that
in 1994 devastated portions of Los Angeles. But in many ways, as with
the earlier film, L.A. can be seen as a critical response to elements in the
later Reagan revolution, namely the rise of the religious right and the
emergence of the “cinematic presidency.”
In a 1984 address to an ecumenical prayer breakfast at the Republican
National Convention, Reagan openly declared, “Politics and morality are
inseparable. And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics
are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide.”24 Reagan’s integration
of faith and politics was not without precedence; indeed, virtually every
American president has professed to being guided by religious convic-
tions. But Reagan’s insistence on the symbiosis of religion and politics was
part of a systematic movement by which conservative religious groups

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were organizing to directly influence elections and policies. Among these

organizations was the Moral Majority, a group led by Jerry Falwell, a
Baptist minister from Lynchburg, Virginia.
Not coincidentally, the president in Carpenter’s L.A. is a religious zealot
who prophesied the earthquake that would devastate the city of Los Ange-
les, and based on the accuracy of his prophecy, he was appointed president
for life. Shortly after election, we are told, he moved the capital from
Washington, D.C., to his home in Lynchburg, Virginia, and from there
began a campaign to deport all those “found undesirable or unfit to live in
the new moral America.” Citizens found guilty of moral crimes have their
citizenship stripped and are deported to the island of Los Angeles. The
level of religious intolerance in this future dystopia is clear when a young
woman Plissken meets while in Los Angeles explains her crime as “being
Muslim in South Dakota.” When Plissken asks the warden of the prison-
city for a smoke, the officer shouts, “The United States is a non-smoking
nation! No smoking, no drugs, no alcohol, no women—unless you’re mar-
ried—no foul language, no red meat.” Plissken replies, “Land of the free.”
The lampooning of the religious right is a clear critique of Reagan-era
politics, but another dimension of the Reagan revolution is also under
scrutiny in L.A., namely the rise of image-oriented politics. Reagan was
a former movie star and past president of the Screen Actors Guild who
carried his past roles, especially as rough and tough cowboys, into the
rhetoric of his presidency.25 His nickname “The Great Communicator” led
many contemporary critics to question the blurring of his political and
cinematic roles, and as Michael Rogin observes, the “confusion between
life and film produced Ronald Reagan, the image that has fixed our gaze.”
Graham Thompson agrees, conceiving Reagan’s presidency as “the natural
political counterpart to an eighties culture driven, and dominated, by the
production and circulation of the image.”26 While Reagan’s immediate
successor, George H. W. Bush, was not especially media savvy, it is worth
observing that as Escape from L.A. was released, a new president was in
office who was renowned for his ability to manipulate his media image,
Bill Clinton.27 Thus, the 1990s continued to emphasize image making in
politics and the importance of the televisual and cinematic dimensions
of the presidency.
Read as a critique of the cinematic nature of American politics and the
overreliance on style over substance, Escape from L.A.’s similarity to its
predecessor makes more sense. Virtually all of the plot elements are the
same, but now rendered within the image-oriented geographic space of
Los Angeles—the city of dreams and the home of Hollywood itself—they

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take on a superficial and glossy sheen. As Plissken is led into the deten-
tion center to await deportation, he is confronted by police officers, but
instead of guns they carry cameras to broadcast his incarceration to a
waiting nation. One of the key elements in the film is a holographic projec-
tion device, which creates realistic holograms to deceive one’s enemies,
a device Plissken utilizes in the final ruse in which he switches the real
doomsday device for the “map to the stars” controller. Even Cuervo Jones
falls into this media fixation. As he prepares to use the satellite device
to make America vulnerable to invasion, he broadcasts his demands on
television, and a cadre of carefully costumed deportees is ushered in—set
dressing designed to emphasize Cuervo’s humanitarian concern for the
diverse masses. Of course, as soon as the cameras are off, he returns to his
brutal ways. Cabbie, the helpful cab driver who squired Plissken around
New York, is here replaced by Eddie, a “map to the stars” salesman who
promises to serve as Plissken’s agent and “make them a bundle.” The brutal
gladiator sequence from New York is replayed here, but this time Plissken
is caught in a basketball court and forced to make a series of impossible
shots under threat of immediate execution. Even Plissken’s reputation has
shifted. In New York, each time Plissken meets one of the inmates they
exclaim, “I thought you were dead,” but in L.A. the refrain becomes, “I
thought you’d be taller,” a clear shift to the image politics of the 1990s.
The final moments of New York play out against the backdrop of the
Cold War. Unwilling to serve his country again, Plissken destroys the
tape containing information that would have led to an American victory
and instead allows the struggle to continue. At the end of L.A., Plissken
is faced with a similar dilemma. As the armies of the third world prepare
for an invasion of the United States, Plissken weighs his options: “I shut
down the third world, you win, they lose. I shut down America, they win,
you lose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Plissken’s
decision is to shut down the entire planet, and in a way this is the most
obvious response to a world in which the electronic production of images
has overwhelmed reality and crushed the very spirit of America. As he
prepares to unleash the global electromagnetic pulse that will destroy all
electronic devices on the planet, the warden implores him to stop: “You
push that button, everything we’ve accomplished for the past five hundred
years will be finished—our technology, our way of life, our entire history.
We’ll have to start all over again.” But Plissken is a drifter-hero and far
more at home on the desolate frontier than in the slick media-saturated
world of Los Angeles. The decision is obvious: to complete the reversal
of the frontier-myth and with the push of one button return everything

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to the primordial state in which endless possibilities stretch out into an

uncertain future. As the satellites begin their destructive work, Plissken
exclaims, “Welcome to the human race.”
Moments after pushing the button, Plissken finds on the ground a
discarded pack of illegal cigarettes with the logo “American Spirit” embla-
zoned across it. As he lights a cigarette, he breaks the fourth wall and
stares directly at the audience. He glares through the screen for a long
moment, his gaze challenging us, and then blows out his match, casting
us into darkness.

Carpenter’s Frontier Rhetoric

Across his long career, John Carpenter has charted the dangerous terrain
of the desolate frontier. The characters in his films struggle against the
wild forces that exist just beyond the edge of normal civilization. At times,
these struggles are temporarily won through self-sacrifice, but more often
than not they fail. There is relatively little hope in the cinematic world
Carpenter has laid out, or, perhaps more accurately, there is little hope
for maintaining the world as it is. In Carpenter’s films, human civiliza-
tion—especially as embodied in American culture—is no longer on the
advance but in decline. Whether that decline exists on the far edges of
space, as in Dark Star or Ghosts of Mars, at remote sites where alien forces
are preparing their invasion, as in The Fog or Village of the Damned, or
in the husks of once great American cities, in Carpenter’s films our way
of life cannot be sustained.
In this way, Carpenter can be seen as reframing the foundational
American mythology of the frontier—a seemingly endless space in which
dangerous, wild, and primitive forces are to be subdued to make way for
a newly forged and eternally renewing American spirit. In Carpenter’s
view, that pioneering American spirit has been crushed by the dictates of
modern life—oppressive governments, heartless corporations, mindless
conformity—and as such the American frontier has begun to collapse.
Carpenter’s desolate frontier is a place of sieges and forbidden thresholds,
and this dangerous geography is suitable only for hardened men, men
whose illusions have been stripped away, leaving only their resourceful-
ness and their will to survive. These drifter-heroes may seem ruthless
and amoral, but each of them is deeply influenced by core values. They
are, for instance, decidedly loyal. Loyalty drives Burton down into the
dangerous tunnels in Big Trouble in Little China and allows Montoya to
fend off his own vampiric infection to aid his friend Crow in the final
battle in Vampires. In their own way and in spite of their overt cynicism,

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Carpenter’s drifter-heroes are all hopeful. It is hope that leads Nada to

sacrifice himself to destroy the transmitter in They Live, and it is hope
that guides Alan as he brings the bomb into the lair of the alien children
in Village of the Damned. Even Snake Plissken, one of the most cyni-
cal of Carpenter’s drifter-heroes, reveals his optimism in the end. His
destruction of modern, technological civilization is done in the hopes of
a return of the human and American spirit—a spirit that might be freed
from the overwhelming strictures of modern life and once again take on
the endless possibilities of the uncertain frontier.
To recognize Carpenter’s underlying progressive politics is not, of
course, to dismiss the critiques of his reliance on easy stereotypes. He
is, as others have charged, guilty of allowing the “savages” in his fron-
tier—whether in Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York and
Escape from L.A.—to be represented largely through people of color. These
critiques are in many ways fair, although it is also notable how diverse
Carpenter’s protagonists are, including African Americans (Bishop from
Assault and Williams from Ghosts), Latinos (Montoya from Vampires), and
Chinese Americans (Professor Birack from Prince of Darkness and most
of the heroes in Big Trouble). Carpenter is also guilty of failing to shake
the obsession with masculinity that has warped the Western genre from
which he poaches much of his cinematic grammar. The heroes are almost
always men—Laurie from Halloween and Ballard from Ghosts of Mars are
two exceptions, though even they are somewhat “masculine.”28 Where
women do appear, they are often either in need of rescue (the president’s
daughter in Escape from L.A., Wang’s fiancée in Big Trouble) or a threat for
betrayal (Katrina in Vampires, Holly in They Live). As Suzie Young notes,
“Carpenter’s discontent with civilisation remains a masculinist dream.”29
The political limitations of Carpenter’s vision should not, however,
immediately make him vulnerable to charges of being a conservative
reactionary. Carpenter’s films are consistently skeptical of authority and
tradition and critical of the kind of exploitation encouraged by contem-
porary capitalism. Here the influence of Howard Hawks on Carpenter
may be most evident. In Hawks’s films, the same ambivalence is evident.
In the original version of The Thing, for instance, the film clearly por-
trays the invading alien as monstrous, but at the same time it shows the
authoritative claims of the scientists and the bureaucratic wrangling of
the military to be ridiculous. Hawks’s optimism was based on a faith in
the bonds of affection that bound his protagonists—males and females—
together. These bonds are not as evident in Carpenter’s films, but a flick-
ering faith in humanity remains. For Carpenter, the hope is not so much

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 Drifters in Desolation

in the relations that humans have established but in the possibilities of

new relations that might be forged. Carpenter’s optimism lies not in what
we have made but in what we might make, and that possibility lies just
beyond the structures and strictures of human civilization, in the wild
and dangerous space of the desolate frontiers that pose both the threat of
impending doom and the possibility of self-transformation and renewal.30

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 Conclusion

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 represented a sea change in Ameri-

can politics and culture. Reagan’s “new morning in America” was a time
of renewed optimism and a return to “traditional” American values. It
was a cultural movement that fostered—and in ways enforced—belief in
America’s moral and military superiority and an exaggerated confidence
in the free market to allow wealth to “trickle down” throughout society.
With a seemingly renewed faith in American values and optimism for
the future, there appeared to be little room for the kinds of transgressive
and cynical films that had dominated the period starting in 1968. Perhaps
this is why the era also saw John Carpenter’s bleak 1982 masterpiece The
Thing eclipsed by Steven Spielberg’s optimistic alien story E.T.
These cultural shifts brought an end to the second golden age of horror,
as did the reconsolidation of Hollywood and the decline of the independent
directors. As Robert Kolker observes, during the 1980s, “the filmmaking
business itself was undergoing transformation, with more and more of the
once independent studios becoming part of multinational corporations.”1
The impact of these shifts was substantial, especially on the horror auteurs
whose work helped define the second golden age. George Romero’s 1985
Day of the Dead, as noted, was constrained by low budgets and pressure
to keep the violence within the strictures of an R rating. For Carpenter,
the few films he produced with major studio backing—films like Memoirs
of an Invisible Man—faced substantial interference and were generally
box office failures.2 Of the three directors considered in the preceding
chapters, only Wes Craven has been able to consistently find box office
success with films like the Scream series and the more recent Red Eye.

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 Conclusion

Whatever the fates of their more recent efforts, all three directors
remain remarkably influential. The most obvious manifestation of this
influence can be seen in the flood of remakes emerging from the back
catalog of these directors. There is, of course, always something lacking
in remakes—a sense of treading over ground that has already been visited
and often in more intriguing ways—but the sheer volume is striking. The
spate of remakes began with Zak Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the
Dead, and in many ways this film is typical of the trend. In his version,
Snyder follows the same general plot outline—the sudden appearance of
zombies leads a small band of survivors to take refuge in a local shopping
mall—but accelerates the zombies, amplifies the action, and eliminates
the politics. Amid the manic running zombies and continuous bursts of
automatic gun fire, there is little time to consider the nature of either the
shambling bodies of the dead or the panicked bodies of the survivors;
in this way, the insightful reflection of Romero’s original is one of the
primary elements excised from Snyder’s version.
Overall, the quality of these remakes is varied, ranging from the gener-
ally interesting version of The Hills Have Eyes (2006), directed by Alex-
ander Aja, to the perplexing re-imagining of Halloween (2007) by Rob
Zombie, to the brutal but vapid remake of The Last House on the Left
(2009) by Dennis Iliadis. While the rise of the remake as the dominant
form of horror film in the current era likely says more about studio market-
ing decisions than about the underlying cultural atmosphere of our era,
what is notable is that even in the early twenty-first century, our vision
of horror continues to be founded on the films that emerged during the
second golden age and overwhelmingly on the films crafted by the three
architects of that era, Romero, Craven, and Carpenter. Indeed, in a wider
sense, their influence remains prominent even among films that have no
direct relationship. Danny Boyle’s remarkable zombie film 28 Days Later
(2002) manages to be both frightening and insightful, and the film is clearly
an homage to the first three films in Romero’s Living Dead series. As well,
Eli Roth’s savagely provocative 2005 Hostel manifests both the sadism
and the political acumen of the early 1970s in a film that exaggerates and
distorts America’s post-9/11 xenophobia and sense of moral superiority.
Indeed, a wide variety of contemporary horror films can be seen as tracing
along the broad aesthetic lines established by the films of Romero, Craven,
and Carpenter: the recent popularity of zombie films like Zombieland
(2009); the post-apocalyptic tone of films like District 9 (2009) and The
Road (2009); and the gothic dimensions in the American remake of The
Ring (2002) and the low-budget blockbuster Paranormal Activity (2007).

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 Conclusion

The parallels between post-1968 and post-9/11 are numerous: an unpopu-

lar war, a draconian administration demanding law and order at home
and using torture abroad, a general anxiety about whether the American
way of life can be sustained. What is remarkable is the degree to which the
directors crafting films for this new era are relying upon the blueprints
established by the architects of the previous generation.
In the preceding chapters, I have sought to trace the contours of the
cinematic rhetorics created by these earlier architects of horror. In those
chapters, I have identified a central concern that seems to guide virtually
all the works of each individual director. For George Romero, the concern
is with the human body and the ways in which the body stands outside
and against the artificial strictures of culture. Wes Craven’s films, while
less explicitly political than Romero’s, also aim at the general notion of
civilized behavior. Craven has approached this through a cinematic sen-
sibility guided by the gothic tradition, especially its conceit of a struggle
between the rational world of day and the uncanny world of night. Finally,
classical Westerns have had the greatest influence on the films of John
Carpenter, though he has taken many of the conceits of this other genre
and recast them into the more cynical form of the desolate frontier—a
space just beyond the edges of a civilization now in retreat.
It would be easy to object that these central concerns—unconstrained
bodies, gothic dimensions, desolate frontiers—are not always so present
in the works of these respective filmmakers, and I cannot deny this fact.
Each filmmaker has produced a reasonably diverse body of work such that
the dimensions considered do not always manifest in the same way, and
indeed, for each of them there are films that simply do not fit. Craven’s
Music of the Heart, for example, tells the touching and true story of a
woman who brings a love for the violin to inner-city children in Harlem.
It would be difficult to force this film into the gothic parameters that
guide much of his work, and so I have not done so. The same could be
said for Romero’s There’s Always Vanilla, and in these instances I simply
acknowledge that filmmakers are not so much bound by their narrative
tendencies as guided by them.
Another obvious objection to the preceding readings is that these con-
cerns are not exclusive to the filmmakers, and this again is true. Clearly,
Romero has shown interest in sites of siege (especially in his Living Dead
films), just as Craven has been interested in the body and Carpenter
has utilized gothic forms (In the Mouth of Madness comes to mind).
Once again, and the crucial point here, my purpose in this book has not
been to reduce the variety of films produced by these three directors but

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 Conclusion

rather to enhance our understanding of their works by exploring the

variety of ways in which each addresses his central concerns. Moreover,
I hope to have demonstrated the ways in which these prevailing themes
have shaped not only the aesthetic contours of their films but also their
political implications.
In the end, my hope is that the critical readings offered in the preced-
ing chapters open up a wider conversation about the works of Romero,
Craven, and Carpenter. Just like their colleagues who enjoy more main-
stream respect—like Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola—these
directors also helped to alter the vision of American cinema during the
dynamic period of the 1970s, and their films laid the foundation upon
which more recent generations of filmmakers have worked. One might
even argue that the horror films of the 1970s played a crucial role in push-
ing the filmic, political, and cultural boundaries of this period. The horror
films of the second golden age, perhaps more than any other type of film,
explored issues of repression, transgression, violence, and anger in direct
and sometimes shocking ways. While numerous horror film directors of
this period addressed these kinds of issues, few did so as effectively or as
provocatively as Romero, Craven, and Carpenter.
While it is clear that all three directors engaged questions of repression
and the unsettling return of things repressed, I hope it is also clear that
each of these filmmakers engaged those questions through unique rhe-
torical styles. As noted earlier in this work, the overwhelming tendency
has been to study horror films in relation to the genre and the relation
of the genre to the broader cultural history. These studies are, of course,
valuable, but they can occlude the differences across individual filmmak-
ers. The preceding analyses recommend a greater attention to the impact
of the auteur on the intersections of genre and historical contexts. How
different might our understanding of horror’s golden age be if considered
through the unique rhetorical visions of directors like Tod Browning and
James Whale, or how might we regard the creature features of the 1950s if
considered in relation to directors like Irvin Yeaworth or Roger Corman?
Framing these kinds of questions is a way of directing our attention to the
rhetoric of horror—the means by which fantastic tales of otherworldly
happenings are made to feel meaningful and provocative.
In the end, whatever their futures may hold, George Romero, Wes
Craven, and John Carpenter helped to reshape our vision of horror dur-
ing the volatile and productive period of horror’s second golden age. In
each of their bodies of work, they took the horror genre into the latter
half of the twentieth century and navigated it in a darker, more brutal,

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 Conclusion

and more cynical direction, a direction that, in many ways, mirrored the
difficult times in which their films were made. In this way, the films of
these three directors and their peers served as a dark mirror reflecting
back a bleak and critical vision of the American dream.

173
 F ilmo g raph y
N otes
S elected B iblio g raph y
I nde x
 Filmography

The filmography below consists of only feature-length and theatrically released films
directed by George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter. Only some of the
principals involved in producing these films and some of the main cast members
are listed. More comprehensive filmographies of works these three filmmakers have
written, produced, or directed, for theatrical release, television, or other mediums,
can be found in other publications or on the helpful website www.imdb.com.
For a comprehensive filmography of Romero’s films, see Tony Williams, The
Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (London: Wallflower Press,
2003); for Carpenter, see Ian Conrich and David Woods, eds., The Cinema of John
Carpenter: The Technique of Terror (London: Wallflower Press, 2004).

George A. Romero
1968
Night of the Living Dead
producers: Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman
screenplay: George A. Romero and John A. Russo
editor: George A. Romero
director: George A. Romero
cast: Ben–Duane Jones, Barbara–Judith O’Dea, Harry Cooper–Karl
Hardman, Helen Cooper–Marilyn Eastman, Karen Cooper–Kyra Schon,
Johnny–Russell Streiner, Tom–Keith Wayne, Judy–Judith Riley

1972
There’s Always Vanilla
producers: Russell W. Streiner and John A. Russo
screenplay: Rudolph J. Ricci
editor: George A. Romero
director: George A. Romero
cast: Chris–Ray Laine, Lynn–Judith Streiner, Michael–
Richard Ricci, Terri–Johanna Lawrence

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 Filmography
1973
Hungry Wives (aka Season of the Witch, Jack’s Wife)
executive producer: Alvin Croft
producer: Nancy M. Romero
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: George A. Romero
director: George A. Romero
cast: Joan–Jan White, Gregg–Ray Laine, Shirley–
Ann Muffly, Nikki–Joedda McClain

1973
The Crazies (aka Codename: Trixie)
producer: Alvin Croft
screenplay: George A. Romero (with original script by Paul McCollough)
editor: George A. Romero
director: George A. Romero
cast: David–Will MacMillan, Judy–Lane Carroll, Clank–Harold
Wayne Jones, Kathy–Lynn Lowry, Colonel Peckem–Lloyd Hollar

1977
Martin
producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: George A. Romero
director: George A. Romero
cast: Martin–John Amplas, Tada Cuda–Lincoln Maazel,
Christina–Christine Forrest, Mrs. Santini–Elayne Nadeau

1978
Dawn of the Dead
executive producers: Claudio Argento and Alfredo Cuomo
producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: George A. Romero
director: George A. Romero
cast: Stephen–David Emge, Peter–Ken Foree, Roger–
Scott H. Reiniger, Francine–Gaylen Ross

1981
Knightriders
executive producer: Salah M. Hassanein
producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
screenplay: George A. Romero
editors: George A. Romero and Pasquale Buba
director: George A. Romero
cast: King Billy–Ed Harris, Alan–Gary Lahti, Morgan–
Tom Savini, Linet–Amy Ingersoll

178
 Filmography
1982
Creepshow
executive producer: Salah M. Hassanein
producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
screenplay: Stephen King
editors: Pasquale Buba, Paul Hirsch, George A. Romero, and Michael Spolan
director: George A. Romero
cast: Harry Blaine–Ed Harris, Henry Northup–Hal Holbrook,
Wilma Northup–Adrienne Barbeau, Dexter Stanley–Fritz Weaver,
Richard Vickers–Leslie Nielsen, Henry Wentworth–Ted Danson,
Jordy Verrill–Stephen King, Upson Pratt–E. G. Marshall

1985
Day of the Dead
executive producer: Salah M. Hassanein
producer: Richard P. Rubinstein
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: Pasquale Buba
director: George A. Romero
cast: Sarah–Lori Cardille, John–Terry Alexander, Captain Rhodes–Joseph
Pilato, Private Salazar–Anthony Dileo Jr., Bub–Sherman Howard

1988
Monkey Shines
producer: Charles Evans
screenplay: George A. Romero (based on the novel
Monkeyshines by Michael Stewart)
editor: Pasquale Buba
director: George A. Romero
cast: Allan Mann–Jason Beghe, Geoffrey–John Pankow, Melanie–Kate
McNeil, Dorothy Mann–Joyce Van Patten, Maryanne–Christine Forrest

1990
Two Evil Eyes (“The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar” segment)
executive producers: Claudio Argento and Dario Argento
producer: Achille Manzotti
screenplay: George A. Romero (based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe)
editor: Pasquale Buba
director: George A. Romero (“The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar”
segment) and Dario Argento (“The Black Cat” segment)
cast (“The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar”): Jessica
Valdemar–Adrienne Barbeau, Ernest Valdemar–Bingo
O’Malley, Dr. Robert Hoffman–Ramy Zada

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 Filmography
1993
The Dark Half
executive producer: George A. Romero
producer: Declan Baldwin
screenplay: George A. Romero (based on the novel
The Dark Half by Stephen King)
editor: Pasquale Buba
director: George A. Romero
cast: Thad Beaumont/George Stark–Timothy Hutton, Liz Beaumont–
Amy Madigan, Sheriff Alan Pangborn–Michael Rooker

2000
Bruiser
executive producer: Allen M. Shore
producers: Ben Barenholtz and Peter Grunwald
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: Mieum Jan Eramo
director: George A. Romero
cast: Henry Creedlow–Jason Felmyng, Milo Styles–Peter Stormare,
Rosemary Newley–Leslie Hope, Janine Creedlow–Nina Garbiras

2005
Land of the Dead
executive producers: Steve Barnett, Dennis E. Jones,
Ryan Kavanaugh, and Lynwood Spinks
producers: Mark Canton, Bernie Goldmann, and Peter Grunwald
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: Michael Doherty
director: George A. Romero
cast: Riley Denbo–Simon Baker, Cholo DeMora–John Leguizamo,
Kaufman–Dennis Hopper, Slack–Asia Argento

2007
Diary of the Dead
executive producers: Steve Barnett, Dan Fireman, and John Harrison
producers: Sam Englebardt, Peter Grunwald, Ara Katz, and Artur Spigel
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: Michael Doherty
director: George A. Romero
cast: Debra Moynihan–Michelle Morgan, Jason Creed–Josh Close,
Tony Ravello–Shawn Roberts, Tracy Thurman–Amy Lalonde

180
 Filmography
2009
Survival of the Dead
executive producers: D. J. Carson, Michael Doherty, Dan Fireman, Peter
Grunwald, Ara Katz, George A. Romero, Art Spigel, and Patrice Theroux
producer: Paul Devonshire
screenplay: George A. Romero
editor: Michael Doherty
director: George A. Romero
cast: Sarge Nicotine Crockett–Alan Van Sprang, Patrick O’Flynn–
Kenneth Welsh, Janet/Jane O’Flynn–Kathleen Munroe

Wes Craven
1972
The Last House on the Left
producer: Sean S. Cunningham
screenplay: Wes Craven (based on the screenplay
The Virgin Spring by Ulla Isaksson)
editor: Wes Craven
director: Wes Craven
cast: Mari Collingwood–Sandra Cassell, Phyllis Stone–Lucy
Grantham, Krug Stillo–David A. Hess, Weasel–Fred Lincoln, Sadie–
Jeramie Rain, Junior Stillo–Marc Sheffler, Dr. John Collingwood–
Gaylor St. James, Estelle Collingwood–Cynthia Carr

1977
The Hills Have Eyes
producer: Peter Locke
screenplay: Wes Craven
editor: Wes Craven
director: Wes Craven
cast: Brenda Carter–Susan Lanier, Bobby Carter–Robert Houston, Doug
Wood–Martin Speer, Lynne Wood–Dee Wallace, Jupiter–James Whitworth,
Mars–Lance Gordon, Pluto–Michael Berryman, Ruby–Janus Blythe

1981
Deadly Blessing
executive producer: William Gilmore
producers: Patricia Herskovic, Max A. Keller, and Michelline H. Keller
screenplay: Glenn M. Benest, Matthew Barr, and Wes Craven
editor: Richard Bracken
director: Wes Craven
cast: Martha Schmidt–Maren Jensen, Lana Marcus–
Sharon Stone, Vicky Anderson–Su

181
 Filmography
1982
Swamp Thing
producers: Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan
screenplay: Wes Craven (based on the comic book character
created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson)
editor: Richard Bracken
director: Wes Craven
cast: Dr. Anton Arcane–Louis Jourdan, Alice Cable–
Adrienne Barbeau, Dr. Alec Holland–Ray Wise

1984
A Nightmare on Elm Street
executive producers: Stanley Dudelson and Joseph Wolf
producer: Robert Shaye
screenplay: Wes Craven
editors: Rick Shaine and Pat McMahon
director: Wes Craven
cast: Nancy Thompson–Heather Langenkamp, Tina–Amanda Wyss, Marge
Thompson–Ronee Blakley, Lt. Donald Thompson–John Saxon, Rod Lane–
Nick Corri, Glen Lantz–Johnny Depp, Fred Krueger–Robert Englund

1985
The Hills Have Eyes II
producers: Barry Cahn and Peter Locke
screenplay: Wes Craven
editor: Richard Bracken
director: Wes Craven
cast: Cass–Tamara Stafford, Roy–Kevin Blair, The Reaper–John Bloom

1986
Deadly Friend
executive producer: Patrick Kelley
producer: Robert M. Sherman
screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin (based on the novel Friend by Diana Henstell)
editor: Michael Eliot
director: Wes Craven
cast: Paul–Matthew Laborteaux, Samantha–
Kristy Swanson, Tom–Michael Sharrett

182
 Filmography
1988
The Serpent and the Rainbow
executive producers: Keith Barish and Rob Cohen
producers: Doug Claybourne and David Ladd
screenplay: Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman (based on the novel The
Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the
Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombies, and Magic by Wade Davis)
editor: Glenn Farr
director: Wes Craven
cast: Dennis Alan–Bill Pullman, Marielle Duchamp–
Cathy Tyson, Dargent Peytraud–Zakes Mokae

1989
Shocker
executive producers: Wes Craven and Shep Gordon
producers: Barin Kumar and Marianne Maddalena
screenplay: Wes Craven
editor: Andy Blumenthal
director: Wes Craven
cast: Horace Pinker–Mitch Pileggi, Jonathan Parker–
Peter Berg, Lt. Don Parker–Michael Murphy

1991
The People under the Stairs
executive producers: Wes Craven and Shep Gordon
producers: Stuart M. Besser and Marianne Maddalena
screenplay: Wes Craven
editor: James Coblentz
director: Wes Craven
cast: Poindexter “Fool” Williams–Brandon Adams, Dad–
Everett McGill, Mom–Wendy Robie, Alice–A. J. Langer

1994
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
executive producers: Wes Craven and Robert Shaye
producers: Marianne Maddalena
screenplay: Wes Craven
editor: Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Freddy Krueger/Robert Englund–Robert Englund,
Heather–Heather Langenkamp, Dylan–Mike Hughes

183
 Filmography
1995
Vampire in Brooklyn
executive producers: Stuart M. Besser and Marianne Maddalena
producers: Mark Lipsky and Eddie Murphy
screenplay: Charles Murphy, Michael Lucker, and Chris Parker
editor: Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Maximillian/Preacher Pauly/Guido–Eddie Murphy,
Detective Rita Veder–Angela Bassett, Detective Justice–
Allen Payne, Julius Jones–Kadeem Hardison

1996
Scream
executive producers: Marianne Maddalena, Bob
Weinstein, and Harvey Weinstein
producers: Cathy Konrad and Cary Woods
screenplay: Kevin Williamson
editor: Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Casey–Drew Barrymore, Sidney–Neve Campbell, Billy–Skeet Ulrich,
Gale Weathers–Courtney Cox, Deputy Dewey–David Arquette

1997
Scream 2
executive producers: Bob Weinstein, Harvey
Weinstein, and Kevin Williamson
producers: Cathy Konrad and Marianne Maddalena
screenplay: Kevin Williamson
editor: Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Maureen–Jada Pinkett, Sidney–Neve Campbell, Cotton
Weary–Liev Schreiber, Mickey–Timothy Olyphant

1999
Music of the Heart
executive producers: Amy Slotnick, Bob Weinstein, and Harvey Weinstein
producers: Susan Kaplan, Marianne Maddalena,
Alan Miller, and Walter Scheuer
screenplay: Pamela Gray
editors: Gregg Featherman and Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Roberta Guaspari–Meryl Streep, Assunta Guaspari–Cloris
Leachman, Principal Janet Williams–Angela Bassett

184
 Filmography
2000
Scream 3
executive producers: Cary Granat, Andrew Rona,
Bob Weinstein, and Harvey Weinstein
producers: Cathy Konrad, Marianne Maddalena, and Kevin Williamson
screenplay: Ehren Kruger
editor: Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Cotton Weary–Liev Schreiber, Christine Hamilton–Kelly
Rutherford, Sidney–Neve Campbell, Gale Weathers–Courtney Cox

2005
Cursed
executive producers: Andrew Rona, Bob Weinstein,
Harvey Weinstein, and Brad Weston
producers: Marianne Maddalena and Kevin Williamson
screenplay: Kevin Williamson
editors: Patrick Lussier and Lisa Romaniw
director: Wes Craven
cast: Ellie–Christina Ricci, Jimmy–Jesse Eisenberg, Jake–Joshua Jackson

2005
Red Eye
executive producers: Bonnie Curtis, Jim Lemley,
Mason Novick, and J. C. Spink
producer: Marianne Maddalena
screenplay: Carl Ellsworth
editors: Stuart Levy and Patrick Lussier
director: Wes Craven
cast: Lisa–Rachel McAdams, Jackson Rippner–
Cillian Murphy, Joe Reisert–Brian Cox

John Carpenter
1974
Dark Star
executive producer: Jack H. Harris
producer: John Carpenter
screenplay: John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon
editor: Dan O’Bannon
director: John Carpenter
cast: Doolittle–Brian Narelle, Talby–Dre Pahich, Boiler–
Cal Kuniholm, Pinback–Dan O’Bannon

185
 Filmography
1976
Assault on Precinct 13
executive producer: Joseph Kaufman
producer: J. S. Kaplan
screenplay: John Carpenter
editor: John T. Chance
director: John Carpenter
cast: Bishop–Austin Stoker, Wilson–Darwin Joston,
Leigh–Laurie Zimmer, Lawson–Martin West

1978
Halloween
executive producer: Irwin Yablans
producer: Debra Hill
screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill
editors: Tommy Wallace and Charles Bornstein
director: John Carpenter
cast: Dr. Loomis–Donald Pleasence, Laurie–Jamie Lee
Curtis, Annie–Nancy Loomis, Lynda–P. J. Soles

1980
The Fog
executive producer: Charles B. Bloch
producer: Debra Hill
screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill
editors: Tommy Lee Wallace and Charles Bornstein
director: John Carpenter
cast: Stevie–Adrienne Barbeau, Elizabeth–Jamie Lee
Curtis, Kathy–Janet Leigh, Nick–Tom Atkins

1981
Escape From New York
producers: Lee Franco and Debra Hill
screenplay: John Carpenter and Nick Castle
editor: Todd Ramsay
director: John Carpenter
cast: Snake Plissken–Kurt Russell, Hauk–Lee Van Cleef, Cabbie–Ernest
Borgnine, President–Donald Pleasence, The Duke–Isaac Hayes

1982
The Thing
executive producer: Wilbur Stark
producers: David Foster and Lawrence Turman
screenplay: Bill Lancaster (based on the short story
“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr.)
editor: Todd Ramsay
director: John Carpenter
cast: MacReady–Kurt Russell, Blair–Wilford Brimley, Nauls–T. K. Carter,
Palmer–David Clennon, Childs–Keith David, Dr. Cooper–Richard Dysart

186
 Filmography
1983
Christine
executive producers: Kirby McCauley and Mark Tarlov
producer: Richard Kobritz
screenplay: Bill Phillips (based on the novel Christine by Stephen King)
editor: Marion Rothman
director: John Carpenter
cast: Arnie–Keith Gordon, Dennis–John Stockwell, Leigh–
Alexandra Paul, Darnell–Robert Prosky

1984
Starman
executive producer: Michael Douglas
producer: Larry J. Franco
screenplay: Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon
editor: Marion Rothman
director: John Carpenter
cast: Starman–Jeff Bridges, Jenny–Karen Allen, Mark–
Charles Martin, George–Richard Jaeckel

1986
Big Trouble in Little China
executive producers: Paul Monash and Keith Barish
producer: Larry J. Franco
screenplay: Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein
editors: Mark Warner, Steve Mirkovich, and Edward A. Warschilka
director: John Carpenter
cast: Jack Burton–Kurt Russell, Gracie–Kim Cattrall, Wang–Dennis Dun,
Lo Pan–James Hong, Egg Shen–Victor Wang, Margo–Kate Burton

1987
Prince of Darkness
executive producers: Shep Gordon and André Blay
producer: Larry Franco
screenplay: Martin Quatermass (John Carpenter)
editor: Steve Mirkovich
director: John Carpenter
cast: Priest–Donald Pleasence, Brian–Jameson Parker, Birack–Victor Wong,
Catherine–Lisa Blount, Walter–Dennis Dun, Susan–Anne Howard

1988
They Live
executive producers: Shep Gordon and André Blay
producer: Larry Franco
screenplay: Frank Armitage (John Carpenter) (based on the
short story “Eight o’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson)
editors: Gib Jaffe and Frank E. Jimenez
director: John Carpenter
cast: Nada–Roddy Piper, Frank–Keith David, Holly–Meg Foster

187
 Filmography
1992
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
executive producer: Arnon Milchan
producers: Bruce Bodner and Dan Kolsrud
screenplay: Robert Collector, Dana Olsen, and William Goldman
(based on the novel Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H. F. Saint)
editor: Marion Rothman
director: John Carpenter
cast: Nick–Chevy Chase, Alice–Darryl Hannah, David–
Sam Neill, George–Michael McKean

1995
In the Mouth of Madness
executive producer: Michael De Luca
producer: Sandy King
screenplay: Michael De Luca
editor: Edward A. Warschilka
director: John Carpenter
cast: John Trent–Sam Neill, Linda–Julie Carmen,
Sutter Cane–Jürgen Prochnow

1995
Village of the Damned
executive producers: Ted Vernon, Shep Gordon, and André Blay
producers: Michael Preger and Sandy King
screenplay: David Himmelstein (based on the novel
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham)
editor: Edward A. Warschilka
director: John Carpenter
cast: Alan Chaffee–Christopher Reeve, Dr. Susan Verner–
Kirstie Alley, Jill McGowan–Linda Koslowski, Frank
McGowan–Michael Paré, Mara–Lindsey Haun

1996
Escape from L.A.
producers: Debra Hill and Kurt Russell
screenplay: John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and Kurt Russell
editor: Edward A. Warschilka
director: John Carpenter
cast: Snake Plissken–Kurt Russell, Utopia–A. J. Langer, Eddie–
Steve Buscemi, Cuervo Jones–George Corraface, Malloy–Stacy
Keach, Hershe–Pam Grier, President–Cliff Robertson

188
 Filmography
1998
Vampires
executive producer: Barr Potter
producer: Sandy King
screenplay: Don Jakoby (based on the novel Vampire$ by John Steakley)
editor: Edward A. Warschilka
director: John Carpenter
cast: Jack Crow–James Woods, Anthony Montoya–Daniel Baldwin,
Katrina–Sheryl Lee, Jan Valek–Thomas Ian Griffith

2001
Ghosts of Mars
producer: Sandy King
screenplay: Larry Sulkis and John Carpenter
editor: Paul C. Warschilka
director: John Carpenter
cast: Desolation Williams–Ice Cube, Melanie Ballard–Natasha Henstridge,
Jericho Butler–Jason Statham, Helena Braddock–Pam Grier

189
 Notes

Introduction: Auteur, Genre, and the Rhetorics of Horror

1. Russo, Complete Night of the Living Dead Filmbook, 77.
2. Phillips, Projected Fears.
3. Billson, The Thing, 10.
4. Charles J. Maland, “1978—Movies and Changing Times,” in American Cinema
of the 1970s, ed. Lester D. Friedman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2007), 207.
5. For a more thorough discussion of the conception of the auteur and the contests
over it, see Gerstner and Staiger, Authorship and Film.
6. Paul Rotha, The Film till Now (London: Cape, 1930), 141.
7. Virginia Wright Wexman, “Introduction,” in Film and Authorship, ed. Virginia
Wright Wexman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 10.
8. Barry Keith Grant, “Introduction: Movies and the 1960s,” in American Cinema
of the 1960s, ed. Barry Keith Grant (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2008), 10.
9. For a provocative history of the rise of exploitation and grind house cinemas as
they relate to the horror genre, see Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold.
10. For a more thorough discussion of the changing contours of film censorship
and self-censorship, see my Controversial Cinema, esp. chapter 1.
11. Kolker, Cinema of Loneliness, 6.
12. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws; Lowenstein, Shocking Representa-
tion, 177.
13. Freud, Uncanny, 147.
14. Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, 75.
15. Philip Tallon, “Through a Mirror, Darkly: Art-Horror as a Medium for Moral
Reflection,” in The Philosophy of Horror, ed. Thomas Fahey (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2010), 40.
16. Among some of the more recent works emerging around the genre of horror
are Hantke, The American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium;
Humphries, The American Horror Film: An Introduction; Jones, Horror; and Wells,
The Horror Genre.

191
 Notes to Pages 12–31
17. It is also worth acknowledging one of the earliest works devoted to any of these
directors, Cumbow’s Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter.
18. Benson and Anderson, Reality Fictions, 3.
19. David Blakesley, “Introduction: The Rhetoric of Film and Film Studies,” in The
Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, ed. David Blakesley (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 1–15.
20. Andrew Sarris, “The Auteur Theory Revisited,” in Film and Authorship, ed.
Virginia Wright Wexman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 24.
21. Ibid., 27.
22. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 6.

Part One. Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero

1. Perhaps this notion of the unconstrained body might be an alternative—or
at least the beginning of one—to Noel Carroll’s more famous edict that monsters,
understood as beings whose very existence violates natural categories, lie at the heart
of horror. See Carroll, Philosophy of Horror.
2. On the changing relationship between horror narratives and the question of
returning to normalcy, see Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists.
3. Brophy, “Horrality,” 8.
4. Kelly Hurley, “Reading Like an Alien: Posthuman Identity in Ridley Scott’s
Alien and David Cronenberg’s Rabid,” in Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam
and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 209.
5. McIlwain, When Death Goes Pop, 3.
6. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 16.

1. The Body as Contrast: Romero’s Living Dead

1. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan—and Beyond, rev. and exp.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 102.
2. Justin Chang, “New Zombie Zeitgeist,” Variety, June 27, 2005, 58.
3. Humphries, American Horror Film, 113.
4. Gunn and Treat, “Zombie Trouble,” 152.
5. For a more thorough discussion of the relationship between the gothic monsters
and the economic turmoil of the early 1930s, see chapter 1 of my Projected Fears.
6. For more on this period, see Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood
Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Henry Holt and Com-
pany, 1983).
7. For a more detailed discussion of Psycho, see chapter 3 in my Projected Fears.
8. Gunn and Treat, “Zombie Trouble,” 153.
9. There is a similar scene of potentially provocative interracial relations that
occurs in Night. After Barbara passes out, Ben lifts her onto a couch and then adjusts
her coat. The camera angle is from below and as Ben towers over the prostrate Bar-
bara, there is a potentially interesting moment of bodily contact, though it is quickly
diffused as Ben goes about the work of securing the house. It is worth noting, of
course, that the official Hollywood ban on miscegenation in films had been lifted
only twelve years earlier, in 1956. The scenes with Ben and Barbara also include him
punching her in retaliation for a slap, and of course Ben routinely beats down white
zombies before performing his biggest racial transgression—shooting Mr. Cooper.
Romero has on occasion denied having any explicit racial politics during the filming

192
 Notes to Pages 32–68
of Night, but the potential provocation of these scenes and Romero’s continued use
of protagonists of color suggest he is sensitive to these issues.
10. Jeffords, Hard Bodies.
11. In one of the first and still most insightful essays about Romero’s Night, R. H. W.
Dillard notes the overwhelming “ordinariness” of the landscape and the farmhouse
in which the action takes place. A similar observation could be made for Dawn: the
ordinary and familiar nature of the shopping mall as setting. It is also worth noting
that this ordinariness begins to become exaggerated to the point of distortion as
Romero takes on more allegorical settings in the bunker of Day and the city-state
of Land. See R. H. W. Dillard, “Night of the Living Dead: It’s Not Like Just a Wind
That’s Passing Through,” in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern Horror Film,
ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 14–29.
12. Gunn and Treat, “Zombie Trouble,” 153.
13. Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead, 9.
14. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1982), 12.
15. Ibid., 3
16. Williams, Cinema of George Romero.
17. Michael A. Arnzen argues that Night of the Living Dead is the “primordial”
splatter film—a subgenre that combines an aesthetic appreciation for gore as a kind
of art form with a more fragmented and disjointed narrative structure. See Arnzen,
“Who’s Laughing Now?”
18. Anne Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London: Pluto
Press, 1998), 29.
19. It is worth noting here that in Knightriders, the film released four years before
Day, there is an openly gay couple.

2. The Body as Site of Struggle: The Crazies, Monkey Shines, The Dark
Half, Bruiser
1. See, for example, Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness:
The Social Communication of Identity (Newbury, CA: Sage, 1999).

3. Romero’s Mythic Bodies: Martin and Knightriders

1. Interestingly, in the commentary on the Knightriders DVD, Romero notes that
both Knightriders and Martin are nearest to his heart.
2. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, the Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen,
1981), 118.
3. Day, Vampire Legends, 4.
4. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 17.
5. As Vijay Mishra notes in her book The Gothic Sublime, “The vampire, being
neither dead nor alive, contains within him both the principles of life and death (Eros
and Thanatos) and parodies the religious belief in life after death” (99).
6. N. J. Higham, King Arthur: Myth-Making and History (London: Routledge,
2002), 3.
7. One prominent subplot in the film involves the “coming out” of one of the
troupe members who by the film’s conclusion has found love with another mem-
ber, and their relationship is embraced wholeheartedly by the other members of
the community.

193
 Notes to Pages 69–77
8. Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries or Reports, qtd. in Ernst Kantorowicz, The
King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), 7.
9. The connection is explored in fascinating ways by Giorgio Agamben in his Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
10. Laurie Finke, “Spenser for Hire: Arthurian History as Cultural Capital in The
Faerie Queene,” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian
Legend, ed. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1994), 228.
11. Kevin J. Harty notes that it is relatively rare for a film regarding the Arthur
legend to deal directly with the Arthur figure’s death. Most follow a mythological
form in which Arthur’s dying body is taken away, while others relegate Arthur’s life
and death to a secondary plot behind the more important symbol of the Holy Grail.
Romero’s Knightriders, along with the more recent film First Knight (1995), is one of
the few films in which “Arthur is definitely dead, but he is succeeded by someone
willing and able to take up the challenge of the Arthurian legacy.” Harty, “Roll the
Final Credits: Some Notes on Cinematic Depictions of the Death of Arthur,” in The
Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Kevin
Sean Whetter (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2009), 247.
12. Here it is worth formally acknowledging my neglect of two of Romero’s lesser-
known films. There’s Always Vanilla (1972) is a romantic comedy made by Romero
largely to further the career of its principal actor, Raymond Laine. While the film
does not bear many of the hallmarks of a Romero film, it is notable that it also deals
with the main characters’ struggle with conformity and wrestles with the shifting
and dynamic sexual mores of the early 1970s. Hungry Wives (1973) fits more closely
with the Romero oeuvre, although it lacks the explicit focus on the body that marks
the other films. In Hungry Wives, the main character is a frustrated housewife who
takes up witchcraft as a channel for her unfulfilled desires.

Part Two. Gothic Dimensions in the Films of Wes Craven

1. It is interesting to note that gothic literature arose precisely during the period
known as the Enlightenment, which promised a rational and logical explanation for
all things. Apparently, with the expansion of the keen light of science, philosophy,
and modern political bureaucracies came a deep cultural yearning for imagined
dark corners in which all manner of irrational and unexplainable phenomena
could lurk.
2. Robert D. Hume, “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,”
PMLA 84 (1969): 284.
3. Freud, The Uncanny, 124.
4. Ibid., 132.
5. Charlene Bunnel, “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film,” in Planks
of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry K. Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 1984), 81.

4. Craven’s Gothic Form: Nightmares, Screams, and Monsters

1. For some discussion of the Krueger phenomenon, see Fred Krueger-Pelka,
“Freddy’s Revenge,” Threepenny Review 41 (1990): 17–18.

194
 Notes to Pages 77–101
2. Michael Blowen, “Miscues America,” Boston Globe, September 16, 1991, 47.
3. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 35–42.
4. Egginton, “Reality is Bleeding,” 218.
5. See for example, David Koulack, To Catch a Dream: Explorations of Dreaming
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
6. Prawer, Caligari’s Children, 66.
7. Brummett, “Electric Literature as Equipment for Living,” 259.
8. Here I would note a difference in my reading from that of Aviva Briefel, who
observes a long history of masochistic self-mutilation in horror films. Briefel predi-
cates her argument on Freddy’s actions as masochism and as evidence notes scenes
from the later—and non-Craven—sequel Freddy’s Dead (1991) in which the young
(and alive) Krueger discusses his relationship to pain with his abusive stepfather.
Briefel’s argument is provocative but does not bear out in relation to Craven’s films or
the first Nightmare. When Freddy shouts, “Watch this!” before cutting off his own fin-
gers with glee, it is not about self-inflicted pain so much as about the demonstration
of his fantastic bodily existence as a dream-creature. See Briefel, “Monster Pains.”
9. David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 45.
10. Norman Holland and Leona Sherman, “Gothic Possibilities,” New Literary
History 8 (1977): 279.
11. A point made by Gary Hoppenstand in his “Pleasures of Evil: Hedonism and
Contemporary Horror Films,” in Beyond the Stars: Themes and Ideologies in Ameri-
can Popular Film, ed. Paul Loukides and Linda Fuller (Madison, WI: Popular Press,
1996), 253.
12. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 18, 20.
13. See Tietchen, “Samplers and Copycats.”
14. For a more thorough analysis of Craven’s Scream, see chapter 7 of my Pro-
jected Fears.
15. During the final revisions of this project, Scream 4 (2011) was released and,
true to form, Craven again utilizes several aspects of his gothic form in his effort to
relaunch the franchise. While Scream 4 is nowhere near as innovative or success-
ful as the first two films in the series, it is an effective commentary on generational
changes and on the strange reflections created by the mirror of the mass media.
16. See, for example, Gary Arnold, “Craven Project seems ‘Cursed,’” Washington
Times, February 28, 2005, B05.
17. As one contemporary critic noted, “Unfortunately, ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’
falls uncomfortably between a really scary horror movie and a Halloween comedy
spoof.” Jim Delmont, “Violence, Profanity Drench ‘Vampire,’” Omaha World News,
October 27, 1995, 37.

5. Gothic Technologies: The Serpent and the Rainbow, Deadly Friend,

Swamp Thing, Red Eye, Shocker
1. Ellis, History of Gothic Fiction, 121.
2. Peter Otto, “Gothic Fiction,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850,
vol. 1, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 439.
3. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 34.
4. Halberstam, Skin Shows, 2.

195
 Notes to Pages 102–18
5. See Anton Karl Kozlovic, “Technophobic Themes in Pre-1990 Computer Films,”
Science as Culture 12 (2003): 341–73.
6. Interestingly, 1986 also saw the release of Short Circuit, John Badham’s sci-
ence fiction film about a robot who becomes self-aware, though with a much more
family-friendly tone.
7. Botting, Gothic, 81.
8. Andrew Tudor observed that between 1931 and the mid-1980s, “science is posited
as a primary source of disorder” and that the American horror film relied heavily on
the premise that “science is dangerous.” See Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, 133.
9. Maria Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity
(Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2009), 181.
10. Bayer-Berenbaum, Gothic Imagination, 13.
11. Tatiani G. Rapatzikou, Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (Amster-
dam: Rodopi, 2004), 109.
12. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, 2nd
ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001).

6. Gothic Families: The People under the Stairs, The Hills Have Eyes,
The Last House on the Left
1. Mark Jancovich observes that “family horror films” were initiated by Psycho but
did not gain prominence until after Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. See Jancovich,
Horror: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4.
2. Williams, Hearths of Darkness, 13.
3. Ibid., 187.
4. Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear
(London: Continuum Press, 2002), 142.
5. For a thorough and insightful consideration of the depiction of families in
horror films, see Williams, Hearths of Darkness.
6. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 20.
7. Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, 91.
8. Smith, American Gothic Fiction, 44.
9. Punter and Byron, Gothic, 22.
10. Craven also directed a truly wretched sequel, The Hills Have Eyes II. Released in
1985, the film fails on almost every level and is Craven’s least successful directorial effort.
11. D. N. Rodowick, “The Enemy Within: The Economy of Violence in The Hills
Have Eyes,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry K. Grant
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 323.
12. On the wider question of violence in cinema and our interests in viewing
sadism and cruelty, see Jake Horsley, The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958–
1999 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1999); and Prince, Classic Film Violence.
13. Howard Thompson, “Last House on Left,” New York Times, December 22,
1972, 21.
14. Adam Lowenstein argues that Last House reflects the dissolution of America’s
military and political prestige. Mari’s body becomes a symbol for the country, and,
Lowenstein argues, “it is this body, imagined as innocent and exposed to the risk of
rape, which serves as the locus for anxieties concerning the nation as feminized and
susceptible to violation in the Vietnam era.” Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 115.

196
 Notes to Pages 119–32
15. Williams, Hearths of Darkness, 137.
16. Freud, Uncanny, 150.

Part Three. Desolate Frontiers in the Films of John Carpenter

1. See, for example, Cumbow, Order in the Universe, 4; and Maddrey, Nightmares
in Red, White and Blue, esp. chapter 15. Carpenter has admitted, “I got into this
business wanting to make Westerns. And that just hasn’t worked out. I made some
Westerns, but they’re not really Westerns. They’re hidden Westerns.” Qtd. in Mad-
drey, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, 131.
2. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, “Introduction,” in
Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. David
Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dick-
inson University Press, 1993), 13.
3. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Anchor
Books, 1966), 160.
4. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry
Holt, 1920), 1.
5. Ibid., 2–3.
6. Mark Busby, David Mogen, and Paul Bryant, “Introduction: Frontier Writing
as a ‘Great Tradition’ of American Literature,” in The Frontier Experience and the
American Dream: Essays on American Literature, ed. David Mogen, Mark Busby,
and Paul Bryant (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989), 3.
7. Writing in 1931, Percy Boynton declared, “On this succession of frontiers there has
been a regular procedure of social evolution. After the explorers and the trappers and
traders, came the settlers with their first problems of clearing fields and building shel-
ters and their next ones of establishing working relationships among themselves.” See
Boynton, The Rediscovery of the Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 12.
8. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classical American Literature (1923; New York:
Viking Press, 1964), 160.
9. There is a tradition of this desolate frontier in American literature and film.
As Mogen, Sanders, and Karpinksi note, “The dark, gothic underside of American
frontier literature ironically symbolizes the desolation wrought by progress, the
psychological deprivation of alienation, and the threatening but revolutionary pos-
sibilities that appear when civilized conventions are left behind.” “Introduction,” 23.
10. The recurring character of the outlaw hero is perhaps one reason Carpenter
has worked so consistently with actor Kurt Russell, who, at least in Carpenter’s films,
is the epitome of this figure. Russell has starred in four of Carpenter’s films and in
each has played some variation on the resourceful and violent loner: Escape from
New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and Escape from L.A.

7. Sites under Siege: Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing,
Village of the Damned
1. See the discussion of Dark Star by longtime Carpenter collaborator Dan
O’Bannon in “The Remaking of Dark Star,” in Omni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies,
ed. Danny Peary (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 147–51.
2. Naomi Wise, “The Hawksian Woman,” in Howard Hawks: American Artist, ed.
Jim Hiller and Peter Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 118.

197
 Notes to Pages 132–50
3. To be clear, the original Thing was directed by Christian Nyby, who had been
Hawks’s editor for years, and technically produced by Hawks. Most accounts of the
film production, however, acknowledge Hawks as the real director, and indeed the
film is filled with Hawksian elements. For more on this film, see my Projected Fears,
especially chapter 2.
4. And, noticeably, no women at all.
5. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, “Introduction,” in
Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. David
Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dick-
inson University Press, 1993), 15.
6. Roderick F. Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 2.

8. Forbidden Thresholds: The Fog, Ghosts of Mars, Halloween, Prince

of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness
1. Andrew Smith, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis
in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 70.
2. Fran Lloyd and Catherine O’Brien, “Introduction: Spaces, Places, Sites/Sights
of the Secret and Forbidden,” in Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture,
ed. Fran Lloyd and Catherine O’Brien (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), xvi.
3. Ibid., xvi.
4. Tom Whalen, “‘This Is about One Thing—Dominion’: John Carpenter’s Ghosts
of Mars,” Literature/Film Quarterly 30 (2002): 307.
5. See J. P. Tellotte, “Through a Pumpkin’s Eye: The Reflexive Nature of Horror,” in
American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory Waller
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 114–28.
6. See Carol Clover’s seminal work Men, Women, and Chain Saws.
7. See Boulenger, John Carpenter, 227.
8. There is precedence for this theological framing of the frontier. As David Mogen
notes, “From the first, the encounter with the wilderness was no mere struggle against
natural elements, but a pitched battle between the forces of light and agents of Satan
himself, the ‘Black Man’ whose realm the settlers sought to wrest from him.” In
Carpenter’s films, the trajectory, however, is reversed, and it is the black figure of
Satan who seeks to wrest back the territory that was once his. See Mogen, “Wilder-
ness, Metamorphosis, and Millenniums: Gothic Apocalypse form the Puritans to
the Cyberpunks,” in Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American
Literature, ed. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 94.

9. Drifters in Desolation: Big Trouble in Little China, Vampires, They

Live, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A.
1. As William W. Savage notes, the classical cowboy has transformed into the
“modern cowboy drifter,” and in this way the drifter-hero has become a staple of
numerous genres, ranging from film noir to martial arts action films. See Savage,
The Cowboy Hero (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 103.
2. Robert Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1986), 184.

198
 Notes to Pages 150–56
3. Carpenter’s films have a complicated relation to issues of race. The depic-
tion of Chinatown in Big Trouble in Little China fits in with a fairly stereotypical
Hollywood depiction of the “yellow peril” in which people of Japanese and Chinese
descent are viewed as dangerous threats to Western civilization. In many ways,
this idea fits well with Carpenter’s focus on the desolate frontier, but in other ways
it may feel like old-style Orientalism—the treatment of peoples from Asia as if they
are always mysterious and exotic. While I consider Carpenter’s relation to issues of
race in this chapter’s conclusion, it is worth observing that in Big Trouble at least,
there are a variety of Asian characters, ranging from the savvy Eddie to the wise
sage Egg to the villainous Lo Pan. On these Hollywood tendencies, see Jun Xing,
Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations and Identity (New York:
Rowan and Littlefield, 1998), 57.
4. Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 166.
5. See Carpenter’s audio commentary on the Vampires DVD, distributed by
Columbia Pictures.
6. There is, of course, a long tradition of patriarchal depictions of both the frontier
and the drifter-hero. As Linda Ben-Zvi has noted, “The frontier myth is a patriarchal
story. It is gender related. It is his story, since the conquest of the continent has been
encoded as a male adventure.” For Carpenter, the myth of the desolate frontier is
also his story as most of the heroes who drift through these savage landscapes are
deeply masculine males. See Linda Ben-Zvi, “‘Home Sweet Home’: Deconstructing
the Masculine Myth of the Frontier in Modern American Literature,” in Frontier
Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. David Mogen,
Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 219.
7. John H. Lenihan, “Western Film and the American Dream: The Cinematic
Frontier of Sam Peckinpah,” in The Frontier Experience and the American Dream:
Essays on American Literature, ed. David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989), 230.
8. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the
Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 5.
9. Mark Busby, “The Significance of the Frontier in Contemporary American
Fiction,” in The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American
Literature, ed. David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 1989), 100.
10. Similar to Nada’s experience is that of Arnold Cunningham in Carpenter’s
1983 film Christine. It is notable that the place Arnie first encounters the demonic
car that will transform him from quiet nerd into cold sociopath is in a dilapidated
junkyard. Like Nada, Arnie’s illusions are stripped away, but unlike Nada, Arnie
simply becomes the pawn of the invading, supernatural force that he experiences.
11. Lewis, American Adam, 96.
12. Holly’s betrayal fits squarely into the mythos of the drifter as never attaining
real love and connections and might also add to the question of Carpenter’s treat-
ment of women. As in Vampires, the female love interest is the source of weakness,
betrayal, and death.
13. Carpenter’s 1984 film Starman serves as a kind of counterpoint to the narrative
structure described here. In Starman, the titular alien comes to earth based on the

199
 Notes to Pages 156–60
invitation embedded into the Voyager space probe. Finding the human race violent
and not ready for alien contact, he assumes a human form and makes his way to a
remote crater site where he can be picked up by his kind. Along the way, he falls in
love with a woman, and at the film’s end, we learn she is pregnant with his child,
who will be both alien and human and help to lead the human race toward a brighter
future. While Starman’s generally more optimistic tone makes it a contrast to the
films considered in this chapter, it is worth noting that it also features a desolate
frontier and an alienated drifter-hero.
14. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.
15. Richard Jay Jensen, Reagan at Bergen-Belson and Bitburg (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2007), 24.
16. Amos Kiewe and Davis Houck, A Shining City on the Hill: Ronald Reagan’s
Economic Rhetoric, 1951–1989 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991), 130.
17. The argument advanced in this chapter may serve as a kind of intervention
into a debate around Carpenter’s political obligations. The debate arose in regard to
Carpenter’s use of gangs and urban settings—a topic very relevant for my discussion
of New York and Los Angeles in his films. Tony Williams has maintained that the use
of such urban crime elements requires Carpenter to take on some political obligation
concerning the complex issues of race, poverty, and crime. See Williams, “Assault
on Precinct 13: The Mechanics of Repression,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the
Horror Film, ed. Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood
(Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979), 67–73. Robert Cumbow, on the other hand, has
argued that the gangs in these films are an image “of threat and terror with which
to play out the age-old mythic battle of good vs. evil.” See Cumbow, Order in the
Universe, 42. What I hope to add to this debate is a reframing such that we move
precisely to the mythic level of Carpenter’s filmmaking. In this way, Carpenter is
engaging a largely conservative and traditional notion of American values—excep-
tionalism, progress, and xenophobia—but by reversing the direction of these myths,
Carpenter might be said to have crafted the conservative vision as decaying and in
decline. What hope the receding and desolate American frontier can offer remains
open in Carpenter’s films, but as I try to demonstrate in this final section, Carpenter
is not so much promoting conservative values as exaggerating them and reattaching
them to the failed myths of the American Adam, endless renewal, and perpetual
progress. For a useful discussion of this debate and its relation to Carpenter’s early
“siege films,” see Steve Smith, “A Siege Mentality? Form and Ideology in Carpenter’s
Early Siege Films,” in The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror, ed. Ian
Conrich and David Woods (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 35–48.
18. The reciprocal relations between cinema and city are insightfully discussed in
Colin McArthur’s “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic
City,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 19–45.
19. Steven Alan Carr, “Wretched Refuse: Watching New York Ethnic Slum Films in
the Aftermath of 9/11,” in City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination,
ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 229.
20. Mark Shiel, “A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles, and American
Cinema in the 1970s,” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice
(New York: Verso, 2003), 173.

200
 Notes to Pages 160–69
21. Greg Hise, Michael J. Dear, and H. Eric Schockman, “Rethinking Los Angeles,”
in Rethinking Los Angeles, ed. Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 9.
22. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (New York: Verso, 1989), 246.
23. For more on the conservative rhetoric of “law and order” and its use by Reagan
see Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest and the Crisis of
Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 67–76.
24. Qtd. in Gary Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington
to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.
25. For a thorough discussion of Reagan as cinematic symbol, see Diane Ruben-
stein, This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense and the American Political Imaginary
(New York: New York University Press, 2008).
26. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political
Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3; Graham Thompson,
American Culture in the 1980s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 5.
27. For a thoughtful analysis of Clinton’s media construction, see Shawn J. Parry-
Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential
Image-Making in Postmodern Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2002).
28. See Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 39.
29. Suzie Young, “Restorative and Destructive: Carpenter and Maternal Author-
ity,” in The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and
David Woods (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 137.
30. While I have generally avoided using interviews with the directors as evidence,
on this last point I find two of Carpenter’s comments interesting. First, when asked
about his own orientation to political causes, Carpenter replied: “Having a cause to
me means that at least you have a solution, and I don’t really have a lot of solutions
to problems. . . . Maybe I can make a movie and show you poor people, but I don’t
have a cause I’m trying to fix.” Second, when pushed on his position against author-
ity, Carpenter responded, “I’m not an anarchist, even though I make movies that
seem to say that. They seem to be about a liberation of some sort.” See Boulenger,
John Carpenter, 41–42, 44.

Conclusion
1. Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg,
Altman, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii.
2. See Carpenter’s discussion in Boulenger, John Carpenter, 219–27.

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Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.
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Day, William Patrick. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. Lex-
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Egginton, William. “Reality Is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the Sixteenth
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Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
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Fahey, Thomas, ed. The Philosophy of Horror. Lexington: University Press of Ken-
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Subjectification and the Unconscious.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005):
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Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema,
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Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead. London:
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205
 Index
Italicized page numbers refer to photographs.
Abbott, Stacey, 151
abject, notion of, 38, 39, 40
African Americans: Carpenter and,
129, 162, 166; Craven and, 91, 95,
99, 110; Romero and, 31, 34, 39,
192n9
Aja, Alexander, 170
Alien (Scott), 3
alien invasion films, 27, 127–36, 137,
156, 157
Althusser, Louis, 36
Altman, Robert, 7, 8, 10
“American Adam,” 154–55, 157,
200n17
American Beauty (Mendes), 55
American Cinema, The (Sarris), 10
Anderson, Carolyn, 13
anger and rage, 47–48, 50–51, 55, 56,
57, 120, 172
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 33
architecture, gothic, 83–84, 90–91,
95, 100, 111, 118, 120
Argento, Dario, 20
Aristotle, 14
Arnzen, Michael A., 193n17
Arthurian myth, 20, 64, 69–70,
194n11
Asians, depictions of, 166, 199n3
Assault on Precinct 13 (Carpenter),
125, 128–32, 130, 133, 135–36, 138,
207
140, 166
Athearn, Robert, 149–50
audience, 14, 79–80, 88–89, 90, 92,
117–18
auteur theory, 7–8, 10, 13–15, 172
Bachelard, Gaston, 84, 111
Badham, John, 196n6 (chap. 5)
Baio, Scott, 95
basements, 83–84, 111, 120
Bauer-Berenbaum, Linda, 106
Benson, Thomas W., 13
Ben-Zvi, Linda, 199n6
Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 116–17
Beville, Maria, 105
Big Trouble in Little China (Carpen-
ter), 12–13, 149–51, 165, 166, 199n3
Billson, Anne, 6
Birds, The (Hitchcock), 28
Blair, Linda, 89
Blakesley, David, 13
body/bodies: as contrast, 12, 17–21,
26, 36–38, 71–72, 171; facelessness,
54, 55–56; gothic, 80–82, 90–91,
94, 96, 98–99, 104, 114, 120; as
myth, 59, 61–62, 66–67, 69–72; as
site of struggle, 44, 46–47, 50, 53,
56–57, 71–72, 80–81, 195n8
booby traps, 121
Boorman, John, 69, 116
Boston, Bernie, 44
Botting, Fred, 104
 Index
Boyle, Danny, 170
Boynton, Percy, 197n7
Briefel, Aviva, 195n8
Brood, The (Cronenberg), 18
Brophy, Philip, 18
Browning, Tod, 172
Bruiser (Romero), 4, 53–58, 71, 72
Brummett, Barry, 80
Bunnel, Charlene, 75
Burke, Kenneth, 20
Busby, Mark, 155
Bush, George H. W., 163
Byron, Glennis, 115
Cahiers du Cinéma, 7–8
Caligari’s Children (Prawer), 80
cameos, 89, 94
Canby, Vincent, 5
Cane, Sutter, 147
capitalism, 32, 56, 58, 66, 67–68, 112
Carpenter, John, 3, 5–6, 11–13,
123–67, 169–73; Craven and, 121,
147; as cultural and political critic,
137, 140, 143, 156–57, 161, 162–64,
200n17, 201n30; forbidden thresh-
olds, 126, 137–48, 165; influences,
77, 151–52, 170; reference to, in
other movies, 90, 92; remakes of
films by, 170; science fiction genre
and, 5, 6, 133–34; slasher films
and, 77, 142, 145; themes of, 123,
145–46; Western genre and, 123,
166, 171, 197n1 (part three). See
also drifter-heroes; sites under
siege; specific film
Carr, Steven Alan, 160
Carrie (DePalma), 3
Carroll, Noel, 101, 192n1 (part 1)
Castle, William, 3
Castle Otranto, The (Waldpole), 83
Cavallaro, Dani, 109
cemeteries, 17, 18–20, 71
censorship, 9
Chandler, Marilyn, 83
Chang, Justin, 25
208
chaos vs. order, 71–72, 103, 140;
lawlessness, 34, 39–40, 128–29,
131–32, 134; rules, 66–67, 89, 90,
94, 154–55; vampire myth and, 59,
62, 63, 64
children and teenagers, 86–87,
88–89, 90, 142–43
Christine (Carpenter), 199n10
Cinema of George A. Romero (Wil-
liams), 12
Cinema of Loneliness, A (Kolker), 10
cinematic techniques: blurring, 130,
133; comic book aesthetic, 39, 103;
editing and soundtrack, 117–18,
119, 130; fantasy sequences, 61, 63;
mise-en-abyme, 84–86, 87–88, 89,
90, 91–95, 107; point-of-view shot,
49, 142–43, 144; “reality bleeding,”
79–80, 87–88, 90, 95
class, 29–30, 58, 66, 68, 112, 157
Clinton, Bill, 163
Clover, Carol J., 11, 77
Cohen, Larry, 3
Cold War era, 3, 9, 27, 161, 164
comic books, 39, 103
communication, 105, 106, 107–8
Conrich, Ian, 11–12
consumerism, 32, 35, 36–37, 39
Coppola, Francis Ford, 5, 8, 33, 172
Corman, Roger, 3, 172
Craven, Wes, 3, 4–5, 12, 73–121,
169–73; appearance of, in own
films, 85, 89, 90; Carpenter and,
147; gothic families, 109–19, 120;
gothic technologies, 97–108,
105, 120; influences, 170; notion
of uncanny, 74–75, 105, 119–20,
171; post-1982 works, 6, 169–70;
remakes of films by, 170; themes
of, 80, 84, 103, 116; use of mise-
en-abyme, 84–86, 87–88, 89, 90,
91–95, 107. See also gothic forms
and motifs; specific film
Crazies, The (Romero), 43–46
creature features, 3, 26–27, 28, 133–34
 Index
Creepshow (Romero), 20
crime and violence, 1–3, 62, 161, 162,
172, 193n5; mass media and, 86–87,
90, 93
critics. See film critics
Cronenberg, David, 4, 5, 18, 81
cultural contexts, 1–15, 20–21;
1930s/1940s, 2–3, 8, 26–27, 132;
1950s, 3, 9, 26, 27–28, 132, 161, 164;
1960s, 1–2, 9–10, 28–30, 35, 40, 44,
45; 1970s, 9–11, 31–32, 35, 39, 63,
109, 115, 160; 1980s, 10, 32–33, 35,
67–68, 102; 1980s (Reagan-era), 6,
24, 32, 68, 156–57, 161, 162–63, 169;
1990s, 88, 89, 93, 162; filmic frame-
works, 13–15, 159, 172; modern life,
64, 66, 67–68, 97, 165; popular
culture, 77, 95, 159–60; post-9/11,
33–35, 93, 142, 160, 170–71
Cumbow, Robert, 200n17
Cunningham, Sean, 4
Dark Half, The (King), 51
Dark Half, The (Romero), 20, 51–53,
54, 55, 57, 58, 71
Darkman (1990), 54
Dark Star (Carpenter), 127–28, 136,
141, 165
Dawn of the Dead (Romero), 20, 22,
40–41, 193n11; cultural context,
31–32, 35–37, 39–40; plot, 23–24,
29; remakes, 170
Dawn of the Dead (Snyder), 170
Day, William Patrick, 62
Day of the Dead (Romero), 24–25, 29,
32–33, 35–37, 39, 40, 41, 45, 169
Day the Earth Stood Still, The (1951),
27
Deadly Blessing (Craven), 109–10
Deadly Friend (Craven), 99–103, 101
Dear, Michael J., 160
Deliverance (Boorman), 115, 116
DePalma, Brian, 3
desire, 44, 45, 47, 57–58, 61–62;
repression of, 12, 63, 71–72
209
desolate frontiers, 127–36, 139,
140–41, 165–67, 197n7, 197nn9–10;
as gothic motif, 114, 123–26;
repression and, 124, 140, 142, 157;
suburbs as, 28, 142–43; theologi-
cal framing of, 148, 198n8. See also
drifter-heroes; forbidden thresh-
olds; sites under siege
Diary of the Dead (Romero), 22
Dillard, R. H. W., 193n11
District 9 (2009), 170–71
Dole, Robert, 93
doppelgängers, 52–53, 55–56, 57
Dracula (1931), 2, 26–27
Dracula (Stoker), 62, 95, 97
dreams and dreaming, 79–80, 80–82,
84, 87–88, 120
drifter-heroes, 149–67, 198n1 (chap.
9), 199n6, 199n12; “American
Adam,” 154–55, 157, 200n17;
defined, 149–50
Egginton, William, 79–80, 87
Ellis, Markman, 97
eros, 62, 193n5
Escape from L.A. (Carpenter), 125,
158–65, 166, 200n17
Escape from New York (Carpenter), 5,
125, 130, 158–65, 162, 166, 200n17
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spiel-
berg), 6, 169
Excalibur (Boorman), 69
Exorcist, The (Friedkin), 3
Eyes without a Face (1960), 54
Falling Down (Schumacher), 55
Falwell, Jerry, 163
family, 30–32, 33, 35, 109–19, 120, 143
Fiedler, Leslie A., 124
film critics: on Carpenter’s use of
Western genre, 123; on Cursed
(Craven), 95; on Escape from
New York (Carpenter), 5; French
Cahiers school, 7–8; on Halloween
(Carpenter), 7; on horror genre,
 Index
film critics (continued)
6–8, 10–11; on Living Dead series
(Romero), 22–23, 25; on Ronald
Reagan, 163; on Scream series
(Craven), 89, 93; on The Thing
(Carpenter), 5–6; on Vampire in
Brooklyn (Craven), 195n17
filmic frameworks, 13–15, 159, 172
filmmaking industry, 4, 8–10, 169.
See also auteur theory; cinematic
techniques; cultural contexts;
geographical contexts
film-within-a-film. See mise-en-
abyme
“Final Girl,” 77, 89, 145
Finke, Laurie, 69
First Blood (Stallone), 32
First Knight (1995), 194n11
Fisher, Carrie, 94
Fly, The (Cronenberg), 18
Fog, The (Carpenter), 5, 138–140, 139,
144–45
forbidden thresholds, 126, 137–48, 165
Ford, John, 8, 123
Frankenstein (1931), 2, 26–27
Frankenstein (Shelley), 97, 99
“Freddy Krueger Day,” 77
Freddy’s Dead (1991), 195n8
French cinema, 7–8, 10
Freud, Sigmund, 11, 62, 74–75, 119–20
Friday the 13th (1980), 88–89
Friedkin, William, 3
Friend (Henstell), 99
Frontier in American History, The
(Turner), 124–25
“Frontier Thesis,” 124–25. See also
desolate frontiers
gender, 11, 93, 199n12; “Final Girl,” 77,
89, 145; “Hawksian women,” 132,
140, 142; hypermasculinity, 32–33,
125–26, 151, 152–53, 166; white
male privilege, 54–55, 56, 58
geographical contexts: rural, 115, 136;
suburban, 28, 83, 142–43; urban,
210
115, 123, 129, 136, 159–60, 200n17.
See also desolate frontiers
Ghosts of Mars (Carpenter), 6, 13, 125,
140–42, 144–45, 166
Giuliani, Rudolph, 160
Godard, Jean-Luc, 7–8
Gospel of the Living Dead (Paffen-
roth), 12, 36
gothic bodies, 80–82, 90–91, 94, 96,
98–99, 104, 114, 120
gothic families, 109–19, 120
gothic forms and motifs, 28, 77–96,
119–21, 171; core elements of,
73–76, 79–83, 120; desolate
frontiers and, 114, 123–26; “reality
bleeding,” 79–80, 87–88, 90, 95;
use of mise-en-abyme, 84–86,
87–88, 89, 91–95, 107
gothic houses, 83–84, 90–91, 95, 100,
111, 118, 120
gothic literature, 97–98, 101–2, 104,
108, 137, 194n1
gothic technologies, 97–108, 105, 120
Grant, Barry Keith, 9
Gunn, Joshua, 26, 30, 36
Halberstam, Judith, 101–2
Halloween (Carpenter), 5–6, 7, 12–13,
142–45, 143; gender and, 125, 145,
166; references to, in other films,
88, 92, 106
Halloween (Zombie), 170
“hard body” films, 32–33
Harty, Kevin J., 194n11
Hawks, Howard, 8, 27, 123, 133, 134,
151, 166, 198n3 (chap. 7)
“Hawksian women,” 132, 140, 142
Hearths of Darkness (Williams), 109
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
(McNaughton), 3
Henstell, Diana, 99
Higham, N. J., 64
Hills Have Eyes, The (Aja), 170
Hills Have Eyes, The (Craven), 5,
113–16
 Index
Hise, Greg, 160
Hitchcock, Alfred, 27–28, 88, 109
homosexuality, 41, 193n7, 193n19
Hooper, Tobe, 3, 4, 5, 117
horror genre, 1–15, 86, 172–73;
“golden age” of, 2–3, 26–27; sec-
ond golden age of, 3–4, 6, 9, 22–23,
109, 169, 170, 172. See also specific
subgenre
Hostel (Roth), 170
Houck, Davis, 157
houses. See gothic houses
humanity, 20–21, 27, 30, 36, 39, 40, 62
Hume, Robert, 74
humor and parody, 39, 89, 91, 94, 111,
119, 127, 156–57
Humphries, Reynold, 26
Hungry Wives (Romero), 194n12
Hurley, Kelly, 18
hypermasculinity, 32–33, 125–26, 151,
152–53, 166
I Know What You Did Last Summer
(1997), 5, 88
Iliadis, Dennis, 170
illusion vs. reality, 12, 79–80, 87–88,
90, 95, 120, 121. See also dreams
and dreaming; mise-en-abyme
instinct, 36, 47, 49–50, 51, 52, 56–57,
62
intertextuality, 88–89, 90
In the Mouth of Madness (Carpenter),
147–48, 171
invasion films, 27, 127–36, 137, 156, 157
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Kaufman), 134
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Siegal), 27
isolation, 91, 114, 127, 128, 135, 136, 143
It’s Alive (Cohen), 3
Jackson, Rosemary, 62
Jay and Silent Bob, 94
Jeffords, Susan, 32
Jensen, Richard, 156
211
Karpinksi, Joanne B., 124, 136, 197n9
Kiewe, Amos, 157
Kilborn, Craig, 95
King, Rodney, 162
King, Stephen, 51, 52–53, 147
Knightriders (Romero), 20, 59, 64–71,
65, 193n1 (chap. 3), 193n7, 193n19,
194n11
Kolker, Robert P., 9–10, 169
Kristeva, Julia, 38
Kruger, Ehren, 93
Kubrick, Stanley, 3, 5, 7, 10, 102, 127,
172
Land of the Dead (Romero), 25,
29–30, 33–35, 37–38, 40, 41
Last House on the Left, The (Craven),
4–5, 77, 116–19, 196n14
Last House on the Left, The (Iliadis),
170
Latinos, depictions of, 35, 166
lawlessness, 34, 39–40, 128–29,
131–32, 134
Lawrence, D. H., 125
Leone, Sergio, 151
Lewis, Hershell Gordon, 3
Lewis, R. W. B., 154, 156
Living Dead Series (Romero), 17–44,
170, 171; cultural context, 4, 20–21,
26, 32–33, 38. See also specific film
Lloyd, Fran, 140
Lovecraft, H. P., 147
Lowenstein, Adam, 11, 196n14
Lumet, Sidney, 7
Lustig, William, 3
Maland, Charles J., 7, 8, 10, 11
Maniac Cop (Lustig), 3
Marcuse, Herbert, 62
Martin (Romero), 4, 59–64, 71, 193n1
(chap. 3)
masculinity, 32–33, 125–26, 151,
152–53, 166
mass media, 86–87, 88–89, 90, 93,
107–8
 Index
McCarthy, Joseph, 27
McIlwain, Charleton, 18
McLuhan, Marshall, 108
McNaughton, John, 3
Memoirs of an Invisible Man (Car-
penter), 126, 169
men: “American Adam,” 154–55, 157,
200n17; hypermasculinity, 32–33,
125–26, 151, 152–53, 166; white
male privilege, 54–55, 56, 58
Men, Women, and Chain Saws (Clo-
ver), 11
Mendes, Sam, 55
militarism, 32–33, 34–35, 45, 196n14
Miller, George, 29
mise-en-abyme, 84–86, 87–88, 89, 90,
91–95, 107
mise-en-scène, defined, 14
Mishra, Vijay, 193n5
Mogen, David, 124, 135–36, 197n9,
198n8
Monkey Shines (Romero), 47–51, 49,
52, 54, 55–59, 71
Moral Majority, 162–63
Motel Hell (1980), 115
Muir, John Kenneth, 12
Music of the Heart (Craven), 96, 171
Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe),
83
myth: Arthurian, 20, 64, 194n11; body
as, 59, 61–62, 66–67, 69–72; vam-
pire, 59, 60, 61–62, 63, 64, 193n5
Nash, Roderick F., 136
nationalism, 32–33, 34–35, 196n14
Native Americans, 129, 138
Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven),
5, 77–84, 89, 105, 106, 195n8. See
also Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
(Craven)
Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3
(Craven), 5
Night of the Living Dead (Romero), 17,
19, 20, 27–33, 30, 35, 193n11; cul-
tural context, 2, 3, 27, 28–29, 30,
212
40, 72; depictions of race and rac-
ism in, 39, 192n9; plot, 23, 28–29,
30, 31, 40; second golden age of
horror and, 3, 4, 22–23
9/11, 33–35, 93, 142, 160, 170–71
Nyby, Christian, 198n3 (chap. 7)
O’Brien, Catherine, 140
optimism, 40, 134, 156–57, 166–67,
169, 199n13
order. See chaos vs. order
Otto, Peter, 97
Paffenroth, Kim, 12, 36
Paranormal Activity (2007), 170–71
Paris Je T’Aime (Craven), 73, 74, 75
parody. See humor and parody
Peckinpah, Sam, 116, 151–52
Penn, Arthur, 10
People under the Stairs, The (Craven),
5, 99, 110–13
Phantom of the Opera (1925), 54
Plowden, Edmund, 69
Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard), 84
point-of-view shot, 49, 142–43, 144
Polanski, Roman, 3
popular culture, 77, 95, 159–60
“postmodern” slasher films, 88
poverty and wealth, 29–30, 66, 68,
112, 157
Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 38
Prawer, S. S., 80
primitivism and savagery, 38, 114–15,
120, 141. See also desolate frontiers
“primordial” splatter films, 193n17
Prince of Darkness (Carpenter), 148,
166
Production Code, 9, 169
Projected Fears (Phillips), 2–3
Psycho (Hitchcock), 27–28, 88, 109
Punter, David, 115
Putnam, David, 81–82
race and racism, depictions of, 1,
39, 58, 157; Asians, 166, 199n3;
 Index
Carpenter and, 129, 162, 166,
199n3, 200n17; cities and, 160,
162; Craven and, 91, 95, 99, 110;
interracial relationships, 31, 192n9;
Latinos, 35, 166; post 9/11, 170–71;
Romero and, 34. See also African
Americans
Radcliffe, Ann, 83
Rambo (Stallone), 32
Rapatzikou, Tatiani G., 108
rating system, motion picture, 9, 169
Reagan, Ronald, 6, 24, 32, 68, 156–57,
161, 162–63, 169
reality. See dreams and dreaming;
illusion vs. reality; mise-en-abyme
“reality bleeding,” 79–80, 87–88, 90,
95
Red Eye (Craven), 106, 169–70
regression, 128, 140
repression, 17, 21, 30, 36; anger and,
47–48, 50–51, 55, 56, 57, 120; of
desire, 12, 63, 71–72; desolate
frontiers and, 124, 140, 142, 157;
Freud and, 11, 62, 74–75; notion of,
11, 12–13, 172
Ring, The (2002), 170–71
Rio Bravo (Hawks), 132
Road, The (2009), 170–71
Road Warrior (Miller), 29
Rodowick, D. N., 116
Rogin, Michael, 163
romance, 31, 40–41, 132, 150, 155,
199n12
Romero, George, 2, 3, 6, 11–12, 17–72,
39, 169–73; Craven and, 121; as
cultural and political critic, 4,
12, 21, 26, 42–43; influences, 170;
nonsentimentality of, 31, 40–41;
remakes of films by, 170. See also
body/bodies; specific film
Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski), 3
Roth, Eli, 170
Rotha, Paul, 8
rural environments, 115, 136
Russell, Kurt, 197n10
213
sadistic torture films, 15, 117–18,
170–71
Sanders, Scott P., 124, 136, 197n9
Sarris, Andrew, 10, 14
Saturn 3 (1980), 102
Savage, William W., 198n1 (chap. 9)
savagery. See lawlessness; primitiv-
ism and savagery
Schockman, H. Eric, 160
Schumacher, Joel, 55
science and technology, 21, 97–108,
120, 196n8 (chap. 5)
science fiction genre, 3, 5, 6, 27,
133–34
Scorsese, Martin, 5, 7, 8, 10
Scott, Ridley, 3
Scream series (Craven), 5, 88–95, 99,
169–70; audience and, 88–89, 90,
92; cultural context, 93; framing
structure of, 78, 90; gothic tech-
nologies in, 105, 106; humor and
parody in, 89, 91, 94; intertextual-
ity of, 88–89, 90; Scream 1 (1996),
88–91; Scream 2 (1997), 91–93;
Scream 3 (2000), 93–95; Scream
4 (2011), 195n15; use of mise-en-
abyme, 91–95
Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Cra-
ven), 5, 98–99, 103, 104
sex and sexuality, 6, 41, 59, 62, 132,
145, 193n7, 193n19
Shane (Stevens), 155
Shelley, Mary, 97, 98, 99
Shiel, Mark, 160
Shining, The (Kubrick), 3
Shocker (Craven), 5, 107–8
Shocking Representation (Lowen-
stein), 11
Short Circuit (Badham), 196n6 (chap. 5)
Siegal, Don, 27
sites under siege, 27, 127–36, 171. See
also forbidden thresholds
slasher films, 5, 7, 77, 88, 90, 142, 145
Smith, Allan Lloyd, 114
Smith, Andrew, 137
 Index
Smith, Anne Marie, 39
Smith, Kevin, 94
Snyder, Zak, 170
Soja, Edward, 160
soundtracks, 118, 119, 130
space, 12–13, 80, 83–84, 117–18; con-
sumer, 32, 35, 36–37, 39; cultural,
18–19, 36, 71; domestic, 28, 30–32,
33, 35. See also desolate frontiers;
geographical contexts; gothic
houses
Spielberg, Steven, 6, 10, 169
Stallone, Sylvester, 32
Starman (Carpenter), 199n13
Stevens, George, 155
Stewart, Michael, 47
Stoker, Bram, 62, 95, 97
Straw Dogs (Peckinpah), 116
Streiner, Russell, 2. See also Night of
the Living Dead (Romero)
suburban environments, 28, 83,
142–43
Survival of the Dead (Romero), 22
Swamp Thing (Craven), 103–4
Tallon, Philip, 11
telephones, as gothic technology, 105,
106
television, as gothic technology,
107–8
Terminator (1984), 102
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The
(Hooper), 115
thanatos, 62, 193n5
There’s Always Vanilla (Romero), 171,
194n12
They Live (Carpenter), 6, 153–57, 154,
166
Thing, The (Carpenter), 3, 6, 132–36,
146, 169
Thing from Another World, The
(Hawks), 27, 132, 133, 134, 166
Thompson, Graham, 163
Thompson, Howard, 116
214
tradition, struggle with, 63–64, 66,
68, 70, 71, 166
Treat, Sean, 26, 30, 36
Troy, Gil, 156
Truffaut, François, 7–8
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 124–25
28 Days Later (Boyle), 170
Two Evil Eyes (Romero), 20
2001 (Kubrick), 102, 127
uncanny, notion of, 11, 74–75, 105,
119–20, 171
Universal Studios, 2–3
urban environments, 115, 123, 129,
136, 159–60, 200n17
Urban Legend (1998), 5, 88
U.S. Supreme Court, 8
Vampire in Brooklyn (Craven), 95–96,
99, 195n17
vampire myth, 59, 60, 61–62, 63, 64,
193n5
Vampires (Carpenter), 151–53, 165,
166
Videodrome (Cronenberg), 18
Village of the Damned (Carpenter), 6,
134–36, 146, 166
violence. See anger and rage; crime
and violence
Virgin Spring, The (Bergman), 5,
116–17
Waldpole, Horace, 83
War Games (1983), 102
“war on terror,” 33–34
wealth, 29–30, 66, 68, 112, 157
werewolves, 95
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (Cra-
ven), 5, 82, 84–88, 90, 105, 106
Wes Craven: The Art of Horror
(Muir), 12
Western films, 123, 166, 171, 197n1
(part three). See also desolate
frontiers; drifter-heroes
 Index
Wexman, Virginia Wright, 8
Whale, James, 172
Whalen, Tom, 142
When a Stranger Calls (1979), 89
white male privilege, 54–55, 56, 58
Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah),
151–52
wilderness. See desolate frontiers
Williams, Tony, 12, 39, 109, 119,
200n17
Williamson, Kevin, 88, 93, 95
Wise, Naomi, 132
215
women: depictions of, 33, 93, 125, 152,
166, 199n12; “Final Girl,” 77, 89, 145;
“Hawksian women,” 132, 140, 142
Wood, Robin, 11, 22, 112
Woods, David, 11–12
Yeaworth, Irvin, 172
Young, Suzie, 166
Zombie, Rob, 170
zombie films, 26, 36, 170–71
Zombieland (2009), 170–71
Kendall R. Phillips is a professor of communication and rhetorical
studies and the associate dean for research and graduate studies in the
College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. He is the
author of Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, Contro-
versial Cinema: The Films That Outraged America, and Testing Contro-
versy: A Rhetoric of Educational Reform and is the editor of Framing
Public Memory. His essays have appeared in such journals as Literature/
Film Quarterly, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Communication Monographs, and
Western Journal of Communication.