Horror after 9/11

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-

We are extremely grateful to our contributors and to our editors at University of Texas Press, Jim Burr and Victoria Davis. Aviva would like to give special thanks to her colleagues in the Bowdoin English Department; to her parents; as well as to her friends and inspirations Elisabeth Ford, Monica Miller, Sianne Ngai, and Marilyn Reizbaum. She sends...

Introduction

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pp. 1-10

This collection of essays examines the thriving afterlife of horror, a genre whose obituary many critics composed following the events of September 11, 2001. In the darkened- tower issue of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote that the day presented “circumstances that Hollywood should no longer try to match.”¹ How could American audiences, after tasting...

PART 1. WHY HORROR?

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pp. 11-

1. Black Screens, Lost BodiesThe Cinematic Apparatus of 9/11 Horror

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pp. 13-39

The medieval Florentine poet Dante Alighieri may seem an odd starting point for a discussion of the representation of 9/11. But to understand the power of visual horror, we can do no better than to consider his Inferno, which influenced the artistic depiction of horror for centuries...

2. Let’s RollHollywood Takes on 9 /11

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pp. 40-61

As eyewitnesses, TV anchors, and home viewers have been saying since the day they occurred, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were always already “just like a movie.” In an essay written just days later, Homi Bhabha describes the realization that we’ve seen this film before as “sobering,” as if our conviction that such attacks must...

3. Transforming Horror: David Cronenberg’s Cinematic Gestures after 9 /11

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pp. 62-80

From Shivers (1975) through The Fly (1986), the cinema of director David Cronenberg repeatedly depicted the human body thrust to such violent extremes of physical transformation that he earned nicknames like the “Baron of Blood” among horror fans.¹ Cronenberg’s films remained equally disturbing...

PART 2. HORROR LOOKS AT ITSELF

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pp. 81-

4. Caught on Tape? The Politics of Video in the New Torture Film

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pp. 83-106

By now, it can hardly have escaped attention that surveillance, primarily visual surveillance, has become a frequent contemporary narrative figuration. Films in the action- suspense and horror genres in particular rather hyperbolically highlight the thematic concerns of a surveillance culture; slightly less obviously, they demonstrate the relations between political...

5. Cutting into Concepts of “Reflectionist” Cinema? The Saw Franchise and Puzzles of Post- 9/11 Horror

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pp. 107-123

The Saw franchise (2004–2010), on its seventh installment at the time of writing, has been one of the success stories of noughties horror. Writing of trends in contemporary horror cinema, the scholar and critic Kim Newman suggests that there have been a relatively small number of “films and filmmakers responding with dark, brutal gut- punches...

6. The Host versus Cloverfield

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pp. 124-141

This essay explores collective images of global disaster in two films—Bong Joon- ho’s The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), the highest internationally grossing Korean film of all time, and Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008). In these films, certain historical traumas and disasters, both man- made and ostensibly “natural” in cause, become intertwined with one...

7. “Shop ’Til You Drop!” Consumerism and Horror

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pp. 142-162

A few weeks after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush prescribed shopping as a patriotic form of resistance: “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t—where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop.”¹ Advertisements deployed an unmistakably nationalist rhetoric to disseminate...

PART 3. HORROR IN ACTION

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pp. 163-

8. Historicizing the Bush Years: Politics, Horror Film, and Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend

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pp. 165-185

Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007), the third cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same title, ends with this voice- over narration: “In 2009, a deadly virus burned through our civilization, pushing humankind to the edge of extinction. Dr. Robert Neville dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure and the restoration of humanity. On...

9. “I Am the Devil and I’m Hereto Do the Devil’s Work”: Rob Zombie, George W. Bush, and the Limits of American Freedom

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pp. 186-199

On September 11, 2001, as the entire world now knows, two hijacked aircraft were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon building, while a fourth, seemingly headed for the Capitol building in Washington, crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Self- evidently, as commentators such as Noam Chomsky have argued,...

10. “Forever Family” Values: Twilight and the Modern Mormon Vampire

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pp. 200-219

“I dream about being with you forever,” Bella confesses to Edward as they dance together in a gazebo at the end of Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008). The desire for a long- lasting relationship in a romantic narrative is fairly conventional; however, in a romantic vampire narrative propelled by Mormon metaphors, this desire for a long- lasting—indeed, everlasting— relationship is doubly intriguing. The author...

11. Assimilation and the Queer Monster

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pp. 220-234

Monsters are riddles to be solved. Horror movie heroes spend most of their time hunting down the answer to the question Ripley asks the evil robot in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979): “How do we kill it?” This search can take up most of the movie, since horror film heroes are always dealing with limited resources. I can’t just call the cops, because...

Selected Bibliography

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pp. 235-242

Selected Filmography

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pp. 243-246

Contributors

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pp. 247-249

Index

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pp. 251-263