I love the work I’m putting up at The Avocado right now. I’m writing weekly reviews/articles about the 2005 Masters of Horror series, going episode by episode in production order. I get to hang out in the comments with people I know from other sites that kind of rerouted to The Avocado and just go off about horror and directors. It’s a good time.
What I’m not loving is reliving the problematic horror tropes of my formative years with the genre. I’ve been doing content warnings here for a good while now. I think it’s responsible media criticism. I’ve made videos about it. I’m alarmed by how often I have to repeat certain warnings. It feels like excusing some insidious issues with the genre.
It’s not that I didn’t notice these problems. You see the kind of film I’m drawn to here. You see what I put myself out to defend, nay, champion on this site. Give me a dozen messy films like Swallow that try to tackle issues of mental health and bodily autonomy from a feminine perspective over a more straight forward one weekend and done slasher release. I could write an entire book on the value of The Turning, knowing full well that it is a flawed text. But the concepts and artistry and voice and so on and so forth…
So what are these tropes that I’m noticing in a series of back to back horror films from the mid-00’s? The big one is the concept of women in peril. So much of horror, especially shorter horror films, uses the idea of threatening a woman’s life immediately as shorthand for scary. Seven of the 13 episodes in the first season use this. Six start there right away and the seventh switches at about the halfway point. I remember season 2 less, but there’s literally a women in peril episode set at an abortion clinic (in response to Showtime’s mishandling of Imprint, which I’ll get into in two weeks).
Another big one popping out at me is selective close-ups. We know horror doesn’t always have a huge budget. The makeup and effects team do what they can with the money they have. Even when the effects looked amazing on this show, the directors defaulted back to their no budget roots and would do quick cuts to close-ups of a temple or a silhouette or a shoulder piece. The practical effects were never the problem on Masters of Horror (that mid-00’s CGI though…), but it still felt very Troma substitute a watermelon with a wig for a head and cut around it levels of editing. It’s almost like horror is so afraid of being called out for looking fake that they’ll just try to hide impressive work. Guess what? Those constant quick cuts and macro close-ups make me think you are trying to hide some, so I spend my time trying to spot the problem in those scenes.
Speaking of hiding impressive work, Masters of Horror was made during peak “this film is too dark for Robert to see anything” time in horrors. I hate that. My eyes are bad. I know they’re bad. If you light your film to actually show what’s happening in a scene, I can enjoy it. But substitute a screen that might as well be black for actually blocking, cinematography, and production design and I get real cranky real quick.
There is more I can go into, but I believe it would be better to get more evidence from Season 2. The big warning flag in my head is how painfully white these episodes are with their casting. The only episode with a slightly diverse cast is Deer Woman, which is a racist dumpster fire. I hate it here.
In the same way I’m starting to dive back into this time period to help reclaim queer horror films that were critically maligned for being queer horror films, I’m starting to look back on this time period and realize how long ago 2005 really was. It’s startling how much casual racism, sexism, ablism, homophobia, and transphobia existed in the pop culture consciousness. I don’t know what is more shocking to me: that it existed in so much media, or that I was totally unphased by it at 18, 19, 20 years old.
I keep putting work in to be a more mindful viewer of media and call out this kind of awful stuff, but it’s a thought pattern I’ve had to train into my viewing habits. I’ve always dug deep for theme and meaning and historical references and allusions. I had to make the choice to tackle issues of representation in media. I continue to research the best language to use when addressing these issues and constantly read other critics’ work who make the representation question in their field the focus of their work.
Horror, as a genre, is always stuck in its past and experimenting far beyond what people are ready for in the present. These tropes and problematic elements of the genre have their origin in film itself. Newer directors are being more mindful of these things, but our foundational texts as a genre are built on genuinely offensive content. I don’t know what the solution is. I just know that I make it a point to speak up when I notice how awful some of this content was and continues to be.
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