VLVL2 (2) Horror films: Art or Commodity?

[Paul Nightingale]

Jancovich notes that horror films emerged in Germany during the silent
era; expressionistic rather than naturalistic, such films were an
example of art cinema, and "read as high culture rather than low
culture" because of an association with Romanticism and Expressionism.

Hence: non-naturalistic = art. Cf the press release for Frankenstein
(1910) posted earlier: the elimination of "what would be repulsive to a
moving picture audience". One imagines "repulsive" here can be equated
to 'graphic' or 'titillating'.

In "The Culture Industry" (1944) Adorno & Horkheimer dismissed American
(sound) movies that blurred the distinction between film and real life.
Hence, "[t]he stunting of the mass-media consumer's powers of
imagination".

One cannot help but sympathise with this argument when readers of VL
insist on seeing it as a slice of real life, as opposed to a highly
imaginative fiction.

However, central to the Adorno/Horkheimer thesis is the standardisation
of mass culture, eg genre film-making. Cultural production is no
different to any other capitalist assembly-line.

Andrew Britton (in "Blissing Out") comments on the "highly ritualised
and formulaic character [as] the most striking feature of the
contemporary entertainment film".

Robin Wood (in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan) agrees: "[O]ne may take
away the impression of one undifferentiated stream of massacre,
mutilation and terrorisation, a single interminable chronicle of
blood-letting ..."

For both Britton and Wood this predictability, among other features,
makes such films reactionary.

By way of contrast, Clover (in "Her Body, Himself") likens the slasher
film to oral narrative and emphasises:

"... the free exchange of themes and motifs, the archetypal characters
and situations, the accumulation of sequels, remakes, imitations. This
is a field in which in some sense there is no original, no real or right
text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the
individual example lies outside itself."

Which brings us to the active reader and the question of fandom. What
kind of commodity is the slasher film?