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77 TeenaGe TrauMaTa Youth, Affective Politics, and the Contemporary American Horror Film —Pamela Craig and Martin Fradley hollywood’s teen-targeted material has mainly meant teen protagonists coping with teen dilemmas in a teen milieu. — T h o m a S D o h e r T y everybody’s cursed—it’s called life. — e l l i e (christina ricci) in Cursed Most of all: have fun, man! — a l e x (James urbaniak) in Elephant Teen horror and The criTicS Even on first viewing, perhaps the most striking elements of Gus Van Sant’s hypnotic, haunting Elephant (2003) are the film’s understated allusions to the stock character types, narrative preoccupations, and strangely resonant mise-ensc ène of the American teen movie. As the camera tracks down suburban tree-lined avenues, through sterile and monotonously labyrinthine locker-lined school corridors , and via quasi-ethnographic snapshots of geeks, goths, jocks, arty-outsiders, beauty queens, and bespectacled ugly ducklings, the central imagery and thematic tropes of the Hollywood teen genre are uncannily familiar even for those of us for whom both the United States and the period of our own adolescence are another country entirely. More specifically for our purposes, it is Elephant’s subdued expressionist motifs and opaque articulation of repressed dread and foreboding amid the banality of the everyday which intimate the generic terrain of the horror film. Indeed, Elephant’s depiction of high school as an insidiously benign gothic space is characteristic of the thematic preoccupations of much recent American horror cinema. Perhaps most generically resonant, however, are the film’s unnervingly fluid PaMela craiG and MarTin fradley 78 steadicam shots, coolly and methodically landscaping the internal geography of the high school, unveiling in turn the fragmented internal landscapes and psychosocial geographies of American adolescence as it too is endlessly refracted through the generic prism of what has become the key production trend in recent American horror cinema: the teen horror movie. Of course, Van Sant’s perversely beautiful and almost serenely nonjudgmental art-house homage to the gothic underside of the teen movie works precisely to defamaliarize this generic mise-en-scène. The affectless ambiguity and disquieting sense of alienation that characterize Elephant function in stark contrast to the melodramatic emotional lexicon of the contemporary teen horror film. Yet while Elephant’s allusions to numerous high school shootings in the United States (of which the Columbine massacre is only the most high-profile case) and its sustained neo-realist aesthetic—what the director self-consciously describes as“antientertainment ” (Said 18)—seem implicitly to critique the high-concept excesses of recent teen horror, we argue instead that the passionate detachment of Van Sant’s movie—that is, its simultaneous numbing of the subgenre’s affective content and its defamiliarizing of the teen movie’s central themes and imagery—actually strikes at the core of teen horror’s contemporaneous generic evolution.1 This thematic and aesthetic continuum between the leftfield products of the“independent” sector and the commercially lucrative field of mainstream teen horror is, we would argue, increasingly evident in other recent films which focus upon the emotional and psychosocial subalternity of youth. Critically acclaimed productions such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), The Virgin Suicides (1999), L.I.E. (2001), Donnie Darko (2001), Bully (2001), and Mysterious Skin (2004) all underline in various ways the heterogeneous nature of contemporary cinematic depictions of young American adults, representations that are specifically filtered through the horrors of the late-capitalist gothic imaginary. In critical terms,of course,theAmerican horror film has lost much of the scholarly goodwill that it received from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, a state of affairs synopsized by Robin Wood’s (2004) recent and mournfully rhetorical question :“Aside from Day of the Dead [1985] is there any American horror movie made since 1980 that could be championed as any sort of radical statement about our (so-called) civilization?” (xviii; original emphasis). As the esteemed enfant terrible of ideological film criticism (and, with his essay“An Introduction to the American Horror Film” [1979], one of the most influential scholars to ever write about horror cinema), Wood’s concern with what he dubs the“degeneration” of the genre is both significant and symptomatic. For Wood, the American horror film has lapsed into a combination of baroque postmodern apathy—typified, perhaps, by the success of the glibly parodic Scary Movie cycle (2000–2006)—and an apparently reactionary agenda which, as he understands it, mirrors...

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