The genre of Horror can be said to be as old as entertainment itself. For as long as humans have interacted with one another, tales of shock have been present in their nature, and with each new innovation in media, horror entertainment has been at the forefront. First there were ancient oral traditions, with stories and legends of monsters and demons being passed from tribes to towns. Then supernatural literature emerged and the invention of the printing press, allowed horror stories of witchery and demonic presences to travel the world. We even got theatres in Paris during the beginning of the 20th century staging blood-soaked plays for the adoring crowds. And finally with the creation of motion pictures, television, and most recently videogames, horror has evolved once more, reaching its way into the psychological and the spiritual.
Despite the transformative phases which Horror has gone through, the classic narrative elements of the genre still exist in most contemporary presentations. This continuation can be classified as a plus; conventions such as the Jump scare, the hyper violent stalker, the supposedly abandoned location, the immoral or naive characters, the creepy children, etc. Are for many core and essential elements of the horror genre. But the neglect in dissociating these conventional elements from the narrative formula, limits horror to nothing else but momentary gasps. Although through the years we have been presented with outstanding films and videogames which have broken paradigms inside the genre and in their own particular mediums, the great majority of presentations still fall into a repetition of clichés narratives that do not transcend horror into an critically recognized style. This statement can be hotly contested by many, but such happens with every generation of film and video game companies, there are good precedents and others not so much, the problem here is when lower quality works abound over the ladder. Modern creators of horror content have taught us to value the stigmatic and morbid over the artistry and its intellective.
Despite the repetition of horror styles like slashers and torture porn that focus on max profit by pleasing the mass public, we’ve had some respectable and transcending presentations in the genre during contemporary times. In cinema, the Australian film, Babadook (2016), overturns the recurring elements on classical horror. The film starts off with a different kind of victim/heroine leading character, Amelia, who for the first time offers a hope to horror fans who are tired of cliché hyper-sexualised female characters. Through her, we are given the perspective of a hardworking single mother whose troubles represent what many women go through when they have a child to care for and their couple dies or abandons. There’s an air of humanity in Amelia’s persona, very few characters in horror films possess that sense of realism and awareness of their surroundings, her characters recognizes the troubles in the family and fights against them even at the cost of her sanity.
The creepy child narrative convention is thrown out as well, Amelia’s son, Samuel is a kid whose struggle doesn’t come from an cliché demonic possession, or an hallucination problem, but from the internal pain of his father’s absence, the manifest of the Babadook is much about the loss of a treasured presence as well as the intrusion of an unwelcome presence. Because Babadook is presented through film, the undesirable existence of the spectre can be felt as real as a heart attack or a shattered auto glass, the nature of the format allows for such dimensionality and subjectivity.
As to matter of where the film is situated in spatial terms, the isolative feel of cabins or low populated towns is fully avoided in physical terms and juxtaposed for the internal sense, it drives the spectator to rather feel the horror of being abandoned by our social life. The film breaks horror conventions but nonetheless falls in some of them, this is due to the unchanged nature of the genre, the continued use of naive secondary characters, haunted basements and dark urban environments place Babadook in a oblivion escaping reiteration and approaching revolution.
In the video game medium LIMBO (2010) is among the transcendent faces of the horror genre. Despite the differentiation in format and the approach to narrative storytelling from an interactive experience, LIMBO is a horror game that sides more to an artistic creation rather than an entertainment one. Playdead’s game imagines horror as an intellectual experience rather than physiological, it goes for an interest in the nightmarish and the awful, it embraces repetition and torturous finales. The game is presented in black and-white tones and a surreal dark atmosphere, using lighting, film grain effects and ambient sounds just like in film to recreate an ominous experience that’s associated with the horror genre. LIMBO is a terror experience built from the idea that underneath or parallel to our world there exists an oblivion built on the rule of fears. My interpretation of the game is that of a boy journeying through Hell just like Dante and Virgil from the Divine Comedy, but while the poets are looking for Dantes long love Beatrice, in LIMBO we are searching for answers to the vanishment of the boys sister. Just as in Babadook, Limbo centers its attention on the vulnerability and fears of young kids, by definition it presents them in a state of existence so awful that the approach to death starts to becomes a sort of relief. Because LIMBO is an interactive experience, in contrast to film where decisions are absolute, here trial and error is the only method for reaching solutions to the presented enigmas. The little boy of LIMBO has no means of attack so his best defense when you come across an enemy is that of escaping and rethink the approach.
Authors Brigid Cherry book Horror analyses the evolution of the genre in literature as well as in film, and comments that horror cinema acts as a barometer reflecting the cultural climate of the moment (Cherry 169). This commentary parallels with my previous statement about how in current times the genre through all its formats undergoes an identity crisis, Brigid Cherry tells us that there is hope in change, society will eventually learn to create and appreciate better quality presentations of the genre. But in contrast to Cherrys vision of the future of the genre, the editors of TRANSNATIONAL HORROR CINEMA Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael embrace these violent and conventional elements of the genre as ways in which these grotesque bodies of work may offer new ways to see the intersection between the horrific and the horrified as they negotiate transnational audiences’ experiences with culturally-specific and historical trauma (Siddique 19). Siddique and Raphael cannot imagine the future of the genre without this essential elements of repulsion, as for them this is the best way to understand the cultural stigmas in society and traumas in human history, each film are new ways to conceive the global cultural work of the horrific bodies in cinema.
