A Year in Horror – Themes in the Movies of 2012

By Keri O’Shea

In many ways, horror can be seen as a distorting mirror, held up to the society to which it belongs in order to focus attention on certain aspects of that society. It renders that which it reflects disproportionate, grotesque or monstrous – and so one of horror’s greatest strengths is that it encourages us to look – in a tongue-in-cheek way or otherwise – at our deepest, darkest concerns, whilst allowing us to pore over these morbid fascinations of ours in a safe space. You can tell a great deal about a place or a time by looking at its monsters: just as Frankenstein’s nameless Creature was a (literal) amalgamation of the concerns of the author’s day, so horror cinema now can reflect our fears and concerns. Ever wondered why zombies suddenly started to run, becoming robust agents of disease as opposed to the mindless, shambling creatures we had known? Perhaps horror was reflecting that, for a while there, the fear of pandemic and illness was more of a concern to us than consumerism or the vacant proletariat, or any of the old preoccupations associated with the walking dead.

So, what can we say about 2012? Well, a lot of what we’ve seen on our screens follows on from years previous – we still have our zombies galore, come to mention them, now both fast and slow; zombies are definitely the stalwart boogeymen of our age, shambling (or hurtling) past the straight-up blood-drinkers, who have been rehabilitated to the point of sparkling farce. Still, the vampire hiatus needn’t be forever, and they do still occasionally pop along to flash a fang on-screen in a way which has the power to appal. It’s certainly possible to identify a few themes running through the horror of 2012 though, and to ponder what it might all be saying about our current state of play. It’s no coincidence that these themes are most noticeable in many of the best films of the year – although, and let me make this clear right here and now, common topics wash up in the detritus of the year as well.

So, without further ado, here are five of the trends I’ve noticed in the films I’ve seen this year. By no means have these themes never been represented in horror before, I might add, but to my mind they have resurfaced in enough movies in 2012 for it to be of interest.

5: The Devil is Alive and Well

…Strange, isn’t it? Or is it? I suppose we can all kid ourselves that we live in the most rational times of all times, but frankly, that’s bullshit. Fundamentalist interpretations of millennia-old religious texts have not gone away, and said texts seem to be invoked more than ever in modern politics, usually to chip-chip away at certain hard-won rights. With people like this in the world who juggle a literal belief in Old Scratch with a mission to override personal autonomy, it’s no wonder that demonic possession has made a lot of headway on screen in 2012, seeing as it combines both of those. The idea of something occult and so powerful that it can erode selfhood hasn’t just popped up in recent American politics; it’s also reared its ugly head in films such as The Devil Inside (a movie so confident in its horror that it didn’t even bother with an ending) and The Possession, and of course there was the obligatory nod to all things demonic in yet another Paranormal Activity movie this year. Utilising a rather more sophisticated spin on the theme, Brit horror The Devil’s Business effectively combined gritty crime fare with arcane goings-on, showing that the Devil is always alive and well in Blighty.

4: Urban Life is Hell

The likes of F and Eden Lake in recent years have clearly shown that the modern, urbane spaces we have created not only aren’t immune to horror, but can generate some specific horrors of their own. So, in the year that many European cities have burned, the notion of an Other on our streets, sentient but sadistic, living by very different rules, has continued to hold certain sway within the genre. Citadel had much in common with F in that its hooded creatures were borderline supernatural in their omnipotence, as well as being just as vicious. Whatever your take on what we at Brutal As Hell have coined ‘chavsploitation’, the fact that we can debate it suggests at least that it’s touching upon certain common nerves and referencing something which we recognise, even if we don’t like its distortions. In The Raid and Dredd 3D, the tower-block dwellers weren’t supernatural, but they were certainly organised and pissed off; both films feature criminal armies in vertical camps, and serve to remind us that sometimes even modern cities can contain foreign countries.

3: It’s All in the Genes

Concerns over what gets dragged up whenever humankind makes significant ‘progress’ is as old as the hills when it comes to the horror genre, but as scientific focus alters, so does its warped reflection. This year, genetics has figured very highly: Errors of the Human Body combined body horror with melodrama as an esteemed doctor tried to get to the heart of the genetic abnormality that killed his son, encountering gung-ho experimentation and the threat of harm along the way which plays with the suspicions held by many about just what goes on in these sterile, efficient but possibly dangerous laboratory spaces. In Prometheus, wormhole-sized plot issues aside, we’re taken to a variant on the Alien universe where it transpires that the whole human race was genetically-engineered, and the robot David treats the crew like guinea pigs, deliberately toying with their DNA for his own and his employer’s own sinister curiosity.

Childlike fascination with the potential of science and especially genetics has given us a fair amount of childish humour, too. SyFy continue to bolt together various unlikely critters with the same pointless enthusiasm as an acid-head in a Lego box, surely pushing the tolerance of even the most committed creature feature fans. It all makes Piranha 3DD seem sane. However, it’s not all lowest common denominator stuff: Japanese movie Dead Sushi brought malevolent modified snacks to the screen, and made it all batshit crazy enough to work…

2: You may feel a little sting…

Following on from the last theme somewhat, 2012 has definitely been the year of the scalpel. Surgery, for many people living in the 21st Century, is so much more than a procedure undertaken to remove this or to fix that for health reasons: plastic surgery is commonplace, and more often than not it’s driven by purely aesthetic decision-making. But it’s still surgery: you still have to put yourself into the hands of another individual, and trust that what they do to you when you’re not even breathing for yourself is what you want or need. It’s little wonder that this crops up as a theme in horror cinema then, and this year surgery has formed the bedrock of two much-debated, contentious indie movies. American Mary has been a real cause célèbre throughout the year, dividing opinion pretty squarely between those who consider it flawless body horror and those who think it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. Regardless, its subject matter – of a damaged young medical student offering surreptitious body modifications in order to support herself – finds some echoes in Excision, another film in which surgery is key, and another example of a damaged individual whose medical aspirations turn problematic. Hand over your bodies to these individuals at your peril, perhaps. Or, indeed, you could hand over your body to an individual like Syd Marsh…

Antiviral, my favourite film of the year, masterfully extends a facet of modern life we’d all recognise and takes it into grotesque, medicalised territory. In its world, obsessive celebrity fans can enjoy ‘biological communion’ with their favourite stars, paying a handsome sum in order to be deliberately infected with the stars’ viruses. It’s designer contagion, and the Lucas Corporation trades well in it. Loneliness mingles with sickness in Antiviral, and it’s all packaged in worryingly plausible terms, just one degree of separation from our world. That’s what makes it so unsettling, and so very timely.

1: Technology is Terror

The ongoing, exasperating prevalence of ‘found footage’ movies within the horror genre points to one thing, if it does nothing else: technology is everywhere, even in the hands of those who you’d suppose would struggle with shoelaces. Technological advancement is, then, no barrier to horror; rather, horror creeps very comfortably into technology, adapting to it and colonising it. For me, the Japanese horror movies which first broke into the Western market in the mid- to late-Nineties were ground-breaking in this respect. Ring and The Grudge showed us that ghosts and demons were happy to upgrade, inhabiting CCTV, mobile phones and much more. Interestingly, we’ve had a few films this year which went rather retro in their use of technology as a plot motif, going back to the sinister video tape idea so important to Ring (V/H/S) or even back beyond that, to the 1970s and to the horror inherent in devising a contemporary movie soundtrack (Berberian Sound Studio).

We’ve seen much more up-to-date gadgetry at use in the genre this year too, though: Sinister made a creepy game out of the DVDs which told the tale, and the enjoyable Resolution combined the lot, running through obsolete recording equipment right through to new model laptops. The point which Resolution reiterates is that dark forces are always with us, adapting to whatever medium they require. Whatever’s cutting edge can have a cutting edge, if needs be. And, of course, The Cabin in the Woods took the notion of old evil refracted through modern trappings to its zenith, in one of the most enjoyable and original movies of the year. Surveillance culture has never been so successfully married to the horror genre as it has here – and perhaps that is key to why we’re seeing so much horror refracted through so many media. If we’re all watching each other, then maybe the thought of something else watching us watching each other is, as horror tropes go, as present and correct as it is perennial.