Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film by Kendall R. Phillips (review)

If horror films might be called dark mirrors, which reflect and make visible humans’ sinister appetites, then Kendall Phillips turns our attention to the often unseen hands crafting and holding up such mirrors. Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film skillfully extends the analytical project Phillips began in Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (2005), in which he traces the “cultural resonance” between horror films and the historical moments of their production (2). In this new analysis, Phillips focuses specifically on the rhetorical work of the filmmaker, addressing how a film’s response to the cultural anxieties of its era reflects not only the prevailing sentiments of the time but also the particular stylistics of its director. Phillips writes, “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” (3). Dark Directions highlights directors George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter as instrumental figures in shaping the second golden age of horror, which Phillips locates between 1968 and 1982. Articulating film history, genre studies, auteur theory, and rhetoric, Phillips offers a comprehensive, accessible, and valuable examination of the relationship between film, filmmaker, and cultural framework.

Dark Directions aims to redress an apparent lacuna in auteur studies: the creative work and cultural significance of horror directors. Phillips argues that auteur studies largely overlook horror directors (in favor of more acclaimed or esteemed filmmakers) because of the prevailing dismissal of horror as a disreputable genre. Compounding this problem, argues Phillips, is a tendency among scholarship aimed at recuperating the genre to read horror films as symptomatic reflections of broad cultural anxieties at the expense of focusing specifically on the filmmaker as author. Phillips thus interrogates the cultural work of horror films in relation to the moments of production and in light of the rhetorical and stylistic proclivities of their makers, operating at the “intersection of genre and auteur” (12).

Phillips further articulates this focus with rhetorical studies, viewing films as persuasive texts that encourage or invite audiences to respond in particular ways (13). Citing repression and the uncanny as thematic trademarks of the horror genre, Phillips considers how each director addresses these hallmark features from a unique rhetorical and stylistic perspective (11). To demonstrate, Phillips reads Romero’s films as positioning the human body as the contested site for the return of the repressed; he reads Craven’s films as unified by an interest in the “thin line between reality and the world of illusion in which our various repressed desires reemerge as phantoms and dreams” (12); and he cites Carpenter’s work as driven by a “preoccupation with space” and the metaphor of the frontier as a repressive technology (12).

Phillips offers an expansive understanding of Romero, Craven, and Carpenter as rhetors, but the book’s theoretical treatment of genre warrants further discussion and complication. To demonstrate, although most of Romero’s films addressed in Dark Directions clearly exemplify the horror genre, one—Knightriders (1981)—does not; however, the book never addresses the issue of genre as it relates to this film. I do not mean to suggest that including a nonhorror film in a book on horror is itself a problem; rather, I argue that the issues of generic difference, slippage, and uncertainty deserve more attention than they receive in this context.

Dark Directions misses an opportunity to offer new theoretical insights into the relationship between genre, criticism, and auteur theory. Is “genre” something that resides within a film text, or does it also circulate through the persona of the filmmaker? Perhaps what allows spectators to see a film as belonging to one genre or another has as much to do with the film text itself as with perceptions about its director. Might the personae of directors be understood as constituted by the very generic categories with (or against) which...