Both Hendrix (2018) and King (2010) take us through the horror history of the 60s 70s and 80s. Using references, explain this process in your own words, then think about the current trends of horror movies in your life time. What kinds of social of political changes in the world during these times do you think can be reflected in the horror you’ve read/watched/heard from that particular era?

As put simply by Grady Hendrix in Paperbacks from Hell: ‘More than any other genre, horror fiction is a product of it’s time’, and this trend can be seen clearly when examining horror fiction throughout the 20^th century. (Hendrix, 2017) The 30s, a time of intense economical hardship for many, especially Depression-era America, saw a boom in horror, both written and in film. The decade following, however – torn apart and left scarred by WWII – saw interest wane and nearly die off completely. Similar is seen when comparing the sixties, a time of civil and international unrest with a similar disinterest in horror, to the seventies and eighties, which once again experienced a horror boom. ‘These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economical and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect these free-floating anxieties,’ said Stephen King in describing the cycle in The Danse Macabre, ‘They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright horror in their lives.’ (King, 1981)

Being a child of the 2000s (2000, to be precise), I have grown up in an era arguably defined by one thing more than anything else: the internet. While the internet existed prior to the new millennium, it is during the two decades since 2000 to now that it has become ubiquitous, ever-present in almost all of our lives, and a force more powerful than perhaps anything else. Accompanying it, from 2010 onwards came the rising force of social media, connecting everyone to everything almost all of the time, for better or for worse.

Aspects from horror media of the past have made reappearances since the millennium – from Warner Brothers’ lacklustre attempts at monster flicks with Dracula Untold (2014)and The Mummy (2017) and the massive resurgence in the popularity of vampires with Twilight, although perhaps the series would be considered horror of a different kind. Internet, however, and it’s presence whether literally or through allegory, seems to be one of the unique aspects of horror in the 21^st Century, especially within the latter decade.

There have been a multitude of horror films to have come out that have focused upon internet and social media. 2014 saw the release of Unfriended, which focused on the haunting and torturing of a group of teenage friends through Skype by a classmate who had been cyberbullied into suicide. While the film’s story was generally panned by critics and audiences alike, it was positively commended for it’s innovation in the incorporation of the internet, both in it’s extensive online marketing, the use of various online applications such as Skype and Chatroulette within the film as storytelling devices, and the theme of cyberbullying and reckless internet usage itself. (Debruge, 2013) While the ‘antagonist’ in the film is represented as the ‘ghost’ of their dead classmate communicating to them through Skype and other applications (‘billie227’), it is clear that this ‘monster’ is more of a representation of the internet in general. As said by King, ‘the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by it’s very nature…it is symbolic’. ‘billie227’ knows almost everything about you; she, he, it, has access to information, images, media, that you forgot or didn’t know you had shared, or perhaps thought was safe in the hands of a single other person; it can expose you with these things at any time should you go against what it asks of you and ruin your life; it can follow you from platform, to platform, to platform – just like the internet.

References

Debruge, P. (2013, August 3). Film Review: ‘Unfriended’. Retrieved from Variety: https://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-cybernatural-1201274261/

Hendrix, G. (2017). Paperbacks from Hell. Philadelphia: Quirk Books.

King, S. (1981). Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House.