Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts

Chapter Seven - VIOLENT TRANSPOSITIONS: THE DISTURBING ‘APPEARANCE’ OF THE IRISH HORROR FILM

Mid-way through Paddy Breathnach’s slasher flick Shrooms (2007), an American teenager, on a hallucinogenic-mushroomhunting trip in an Irish forest, finds himself in the grip of a strange, drug-induced vision. Bluto, the quintessential all-American jock, follows a young woman into the woods in the belief that he has been invited to partake in a sex game. Instead, while searching for the woman’s car, Bluto comes across a cow. The cow, perhaps unsurprisingly given the amount of ‘magic’ mushroom tea Bluto has consumed, can talk: he warns Bluto against following the girl, that he will not only be ‘fucked’ but ‘dead fucked’ if he does. Bluto disregards the advice – what could a cow, even a talking one, know about the delights of dogging? – to predictably disastrous consequences : he is castrated and beaten to death by the woman he followed, who is revealed to be the spectre of the haggard old druid killing off the group of teenagers one by one. Bluto’s fate is not unexpected: anyone familiar with the horror subgenre of the slasher will know that not only is a midnight walk alone in the woods a bad idea, a walk combined with the twin evils of drugs and sex is a quick passport to a grisly death. However, what is curious and significant about this scene is Breathnach’s oddly whimsical and surreal use of the talking cow, which, glowing white against the blueblack backdrop of the sinister forest, appears to be a trespasser in the generic, narrative and aesthetic landscapes of the film: talking cows aren’t usually a feature of stalk-and-slash cinema, which tends to prefer monsters of the human variety – and Shrooms, despite its Chapter Seven VIOLENT TRANSPOSITIONS: THE DISTURBING ‘APPEARANCE’ OF THE IRISH HORROR FILM Emma Radley 109 vaguely supernatural premise with a ghostly killer, ultimately sticks quite closely to the individual-as-psychopath narrative trope. On closer inspection, however, perhaps the cow is not such an anomalous signifier, if one pays attention to the cultural specificity of the Irish horror film. Drawing on discourses beyond or outside the primary generic sensibility of the film reveals a space in which more localised meanings intersect with the globalised meanings of the genre, where interior gradations interrupt and rearticulate the exterior shell. Firstly, there is the matter of the cow’s voice – instantly recognisable to a modern Irish audience as that of Don Wycherley, veteran actor best known for his role as Raymond in Celtic Tigerera drama series Bachelor’s Walk and, at the time of the film’s release, providing the voiceover for a series of radio ads for a property website. Although Wycherley himself does appear in Shrooms (he plays one of the ‘mountain men’, Bernie), the voice he uses for that character is disguised and mutated – a flat rural monotone. As the cow, however, he uses the distinctive, honey-toned, vaguely south Dublin drawl that, through his portrayal of the upper-middle-class landlord Raymond and his aural personification of the boom-time preoccupation with property, marks his voice as indelibly associated, for the knowing spectator, with Celtic Tiger money, class, confidence and consumerism.1 In addition, there is the matter of the ‘cow’: why not some other animal, a more cinematic horse, perhaps, or a more horror-appropriate wolf? The trite answer would direct us towards the historical and cultural association of the cow with Ireland: the dairy farm is an important feature of the Irish agricultural landscape. This is certainly true, though the animal takes on another local significance in the light of the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), more colloquially known as mad cow disease, that gripped the UK and Ireland in the preceding decade, engendering the resignification of the dairy farm site of contamination, decay and death. Indeed, the burgeoning field of Irish horror cinema has frequently reconfigured the cow as a signifier of terror: in Conor McMahon’s Dead Meat (2004), an infection that causes the dead to come back to life spreads initially from cows to humans, creating a localised zombie apocalypse that eradicates much of Irish society; in Billy O’Brien’s Isolation (2005) the cow is the host of a failed genetic experiment that creates mutant and parasitic bovine offspring, 110 Emma Radley passing the species barrier from cow to human through bite. The cow, when read from an Irish context, is certainly a horror...