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7 GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE: THE FUTURE OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE FORMULA Conceding Douglas E. Winter's point that Stephen King's Overlook Hotel is the quintessential expression of the "Bad Place" archetype in American literature, we might conclude that the haunted house novel is already a thing of the past-that it found its roots in the fecund soil of the American Renaissance, grew to maturity in the extended spring between 1890 and 1960, and put forth a few gorgeous but deadly blossoms -Marasco's Burnt Offerings, Siddons's The House Next Door, King's The Shining-in the sweltering summer of the 1970s. Now, perhaps , it's done, its ability to speak to the moment exhausted. A cursory survey of the 1980s and 1990s might reinforce such a conclusion: few haunted house novels of the last decade or so possess the stature of The Shining, the artistry of The House Next Door, the subversive metaphorical bite of Burnt Offerings. Such a conclusion would also seem to accord with what we know of the life-cycle of literary genres-"generaUy from thirty to thirty-five years," Robert Escarpit argues (26). A brief consideration of Hollywood forms would seem to bear the statement out. The flood of westerns we saw in the first decades of talkies has been reduced to a trickle in our own day. Film noir is virtually a lost art, the road movies of the sixties and seventies are a thing of the past, and nobody makes big-budget musicals these days. Closer analysis, however, belies such a conclusion. Writers and directors have time and again resurrected the western, often by subversively exposing the assumptions of their predecessors. The operatic blood baths of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone explicitly lay bare the lie of the western's oft-domesticated violence, while Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven dramatizes the spiritual vacuity of the gunfighter myth. The same is true for other genres. Thelma and Louise gives the road movie a contemporary feminist twist. Reservoir Dogs renovates film noir for the 1990s. Such visions and revisions should be seen in the context of Jerry Palmer's observation that more sophisticated models of genre take into account not only a shared series of conventions but the fluid nature of those conventions in time (127). If we liken the literary greats to the monumental composers of classical music-isolated artists creating self107 J08 American Nightmares contained masterworks-then we might compare paperback novelists to working jazz musicians, all riffing on the same conventions, producing a kind of organic, self-fertilized sound, with a genius like Dave Brubeck occasionally sitting in to renovate the entire field. In short, genres evolve-often through the influence of both aesthetic and economic factors. The slasher movie of the early 1980s serves as a convenient example. John Carpenter's 1978 horrorama Halloween articulated a relatively unsophisticated set of conventions, but the film posted unprecedented profits, perhaps because of the holiday gimmick of the title, perhaps because it is so expertly crafted. As soon as those returns started pouring in, every exploitation director in Hollywood began looking for a knife-wielding maniac and a sexy teenage girl for him to stick it into. Sure enough, bad horror movies (and worse sequels) plotted around second-tier holidays glutted theaters for the next five or six years: Friday the Thirteenth, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool's Day, Happy Birthday to Me, Hell Night, New Year's Evil, andmy own personal favorite, featuring Santa Claus himself impaling a naked girl on the antlers of a trophy deer-Silent Night, Deadly Night. After exhausting every conceivable formula-twist, not to mention their dwindling teenage audiences, the opportunistic auteurs sought greener pastures. The slasher flick went underground, only to re-emerge in the 1990s in the form of self-referential horror-comedies: the Scream films, which simultaneously mock and embody the protocols of the slasher formula. The gimmick here is that the teenage protagonists have grown up with psycho movies and understand the rules of the subgenre -but still fail to survive. Perhaps more important, the Scream movies triggered a new wave of teen horror films, including traditional slasher flicks like I Know What You Did Last Summer, its sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and yet another entry in the Halloween series (Halloween H20, marking the return of original scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, and including a cameo for her mother, Janet Leigh, the star of what...

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