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235 afTerword Memory, Genre, and Self-Narrativization; Or, Why I Should Be a More Content Horror Fan —David Church As a child inexplicably drawn to the morbid and macabre, I recall a time when the Universal horror classics were just no longer enough, but I was forbidden from watching R-rated films—thus banning the “bad” horror that intrigued me all the more through its prohibition. For sleepovers at a friend’s house, my comrades and I routinely trekked down to “Family Video,” the local small-town video store, and perused the“Horror” section located just adjacent to the flimsy wooden screen hiding the store’s porn offerings from common view. Being a semi-dutiful child, I followed my parents’ strictures and intentionally opted for renting those horror flicks that were technically“unrated,”shielding myself from self-incrimination with a convenient half-truth that often exposed me to far more violent films than the R-rated alternatives. From my own skeptical position toward American horror today, however, even this small memory seems quaint when viewed through a more mature awareness of studios’ current marketing tactics; the word “unrated” no longer appears in the small print on the back of video boxes, but is typically splayed across DVD covers in dripping red letters, suggesting that this viewing experience will offer something markedly different from the theatrical release. And the films that I surreptitiously viewed as a child—Maniac (1980), The Evil Dead (1982), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)—those early artifacts of the VHS age are now the stuff of seemingly endless remakes, rip-offs, sequels, and throwbacks as the genre lumbers on indefinitely like a zombie with an intact brainstem . . . or so goes the lament. Of course, as a genre very much driven by profit margins, modern horror has always been prone to such incestuous tendencies, so much so that it can be difficult to distinguish innovations from repetitions—a rhizomatic map would better fit the genre than a straightforward model of evolution. But isn’t that precisely part of the genre’s charm (and frustration) for those of us with more than a purely academic david church 236 interest in its intricacies? Although our own engagement with horror films may develop in a linear fashion across our lifetimes, the genre itself seldom follows any such teleology, often to the consternation of fans. One might, for example, deride Cloverfield (2008) as a big-budget descendent of Gojira (1954), and of Cannibal Holocaust (1980), by way of The Blair Witch Project (1999), yoking together the mockumentary format with the spectacle of a giant monster undertaking urban destruction, but such sentiment does a disservice to the relative value and historical specificity of each film. Because cinematic horror (especially that produced since the mid-twentieth century) is primarily directed toward a youth market, we may spend time gaining (sub-)cultural capital surrounding the genre, only to eventually find ourselves distanced in age and (sub-)cultural competence from the audience currently being catered to—hence the tendency to distrust current trends and seek refuge in nostalgia. Even if they are separated by only a few years, there is often a cultural divide between “seasoned” fans (and scholar-fans aiming for legitimacy in the academy) who will happily recite the virtues (and the scholarly appraisals) of canonical works like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), and teen viewers whose limited experience with those films comes through their contemporary iterations. But we can hardly blame audiences themselves; much as 1930s horror failed to frighten me after a certain age, so do 1970s and 1980s horror films apparently fail to unnerve today’s teen viewers accustomed to the quicker editing, higher production values, slicker special effects, and more attractive casts endemic to Hollywood cinema in general. Meanwhile, horror aficionados often struggle for a sense of cultural distinction by retreating into genre currents—independent horror ,foreign horror cinemas,historically marginalized horror trends—seemingly less penetrated by “mainstream” consumerism, disavowing the fact that most of these “other” films were likewise made to maximize potential profits.1 These comments about the genre and its various audiences are broad strokes, to be sure, but their broadness points to the dilemma addressed in the introduction to this book: how does one interpret recent generic threads without the requisite historical distance for narrativizing them (and, in so doing, ignoring some of their complexity)? How can we speculate about whichever trends will bubble up next without the larger perspective...

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