The Babadook, and sleep, and the home (oh my)

There's been a trend in horror movies, I honestly can't say it's a recent trend but I've only just now decided to actually look at it. In horror movies that have to do with any sort of possession more often than not the person who has been taken possession of is asleep or otherwise unconscious.
The same holds true for this week's film The Babadook.

In fact, one of the biggest issues in the film, aside from the tall pale-faced weirdo who wants to murder everyone in Amelia's life, comes with issues regarding sleep. Her son Samuel is constantly waking up, convinced there is some sort of monster in his room. He often ends up sleeping in his mother's bed and this keeps Amelia awake for most of the nights. It gets to the point she begs a doctor for some sort of sedative to calm him down enough to sleep. It is after he begins to sleep better that the Babadook is able to take possession of Amelia. Sleep and dreams have always been a big part of film so this meshing of these two ideas is again nothing new. This is why Sigmund Freud, often thought of as a joke today, is still so important to film theory. He saw the unconsciousness as the ultimate gateway to a person's true self. So this incursion of possession is one that goes to the very deepest part of a person. People in these films are attacked at the source of who they are and are often lost because of it. Which is where the real horror of possession lays.

The most likely victims? Women. This all plays directly into Barbara Creed's theory about abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine. Woman as the source of fear? check. Women being given over the top powers that threaten castration to any and all men? check. Boundaries of the self-being infringed upon? check. In the case of The Babadook, I can add an extra checkmark for Amelia being a mother and for her main target being her son.

To delve deeper into The Babadook specifically each part of his creepiness comes from a relation to sleep. He first made himself known in a children's book that Amelia was using to get her son into bed. He comes out almost solely at night. He begins to take over Amelia's mind with dreams and the only way she can think to stave him off is by forgoing sleep entirely.
He almost becomes a rebranded version of Freddy Kreuger, what with his top hat and long-fingered gloves that scratch at things like a knife. A twisted face that smiles at its victims.

The second part I've been thinking about with all three films up to this point is how the apex of the horror in each film takes place in a home. The Sawyers kill in their home and Sally has to fight through most of the house to get away, Nosferatu threatens Europe simply by buying a house and Mina Harker gives up her life in her home (also in her bedroom as well which almost plays into my earlier point), after being possessed Amelia doesn't really leave her house as she threatens and attacks Samuel. The Babadook is even trapped in the very depth of Amelia's house. The depth of the womb as some theories put it (and I cannot remember who said this).

Following both paths of thinking the woman as a person becomes a source of fear but her womb becomes a source of safety. This puts women in horror films in their own liminal space. And I can't decide if this is another way to make women more terrifying or less human. Maybe both.

Nosferatu and the Decay of Fear

    This is an image that many people who watched the popular Nickolodeon tv show "Spongebob Squarepants" will recognize, those most are missing the key context. The episode this shot is shown in is meant to be one showcasing the character's fears and how ridiculous they become as time passes. By the end of the episode, a non-sequitur is thrown in. Nosferatu, a horror villain, is used in what is arguably the funniest gag in the show's history. This was a film made before there were large scale regulations on filmmaking, the only constraints were the abilities of the crew, no one telling them they were going too far. But when I was watching the movie I noted that this shot, and the one preceding it make up the scariest part of the movie. I wasn't scared but I found it eerie.
This seems odd, one of the most popular horror films of all time and the scariest part has become a joke. Don't get me wrong this movie is amazing, lovely set pieces and camera work come together to make a good film. But it's not scary. At least not to me, or most modern audiences.
This brings up another point, in the last film I posted about Texas Chainsaw Massacre audiences were so horrified by what they saw that the movie was often condemned or outright banned from being shown. But many people in the class found themselves laughing.
    Fear has decayed in our society. Or the tolerance for fear has become much higher than before.
    If I showed an audience from 1922 (the year Nosferatu was released) the most garbage B rated horror movie from the last decade, say The Bye Bye Man, I feel like most of us would agree at least half of them would pass out from either shock or fear (or perhaps the fact that this is a film with sound, color, and technology beyond their understanding but that's beside the point). But again this is what we today consider a terrible movie with no scare value.
    I think there are three reasons for this shift in what we as a culture find scary. The first being that as people get used to Body Genre films filmmakers are forced to "up the ante" in order to get similar reactions from their audiences. We see this all the time from porn actors (mostly women) who complain that their directors are forcing them to perform more brutal and hardcore situations in order to keep getting views and payments from their films. From internet "celebrities" who perform wilder stunts so as to get more attention. In horror where slasher films get more blood and gore, psychological films begin to incorporate technology that has yet to be invented, and monsters who kill people in more creative and brutal ways.
    The second has to do with the world as a whole. As the World Wide Web became more popular and social media applications more mainstream people saw real-world horror. I remember coming home one day crying because a friend of mine had told me she found a video of a man skinning puppies online. I hadn't even seen the video but it was enough for me at the time. But I have seen movies that involve people being skinned alive and I barely flinch. Our capacity for empathy, especially towards fictional people, has been changed. Videos of unarmed men being shot by police in the streets, tales of people who were captured and tortured by different governments, people's experiences with real trauma have changed how we are able to connect to characters experiencing fake fear. When we are exposed to more and more of the real world it becomes harder to take these films seriously.
    The final one is a little obvious but changes in technology and the ways horror films are made have also affected what we find scary. More realistic props and color help make the world these characters inhabit seem real, sure. But I also found the sound design to be a bigger point. While watching Nosferatu I kept thinking about how the sound design in the film could have been more in tune with what I saw on screen. The music seemed almost disconnected and I'm not sure if it was the version I was watching or if it had to do with how grating I found the score. But little noises in modern films help to build to the world and the anticipation of what is to come. Take the sound of each character's footsteps in A Quiet Place, the squeaks of Danny's trike as he rides through the halls of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining,  or even the orchestral stings from the opening shots of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The ways these films are made are so different when compared to the silent era. Synchronized sound being the biggest reason for these changes.
     Nosferatu is a prime example of a well-made horror movie that has decayed with time. As technology and cultural focus changes, I am left to wonder what horror films of the future will hold. Perhaps Virtual Reality will take the place of traditional filmmaking? After all, what's more, terrifying than being in the very same place as the characters?

How is Gender Affected in a Slasher Film.

The genre of slasher films is almost wholly defined by what roles men and women play in the films; roles that have been shaped and changed by time and changing cultural landscape. What once was one woman against an angry man has become a group of people getting picked off one by one, usually with a woman as the final victim or sole survivor. What was once an adult woman has now become teenagers, and the feminine girl has become a phallic survivor. Despite these changes, the roles of sex within slasher films have not been affected.  In the film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, each character plays up their role in standard fashion, especially the women.

The biggest part of any slasher film is the deaths of the characters and the way the deaths are depicted, hinges on whether the character dying is a man or a woman. The men are killed off quickly, usually with a single blow (Kirk, Jerry, and Franklin are all attacked and killed with a single blow). The women are forced to suffer through their deaths. When Pam is caught she is put on a meat hook and forced to watch Kirk get dismembered. The camera chooses to focus on her screaming and not Kirk as he is being cut up by Leatherface. Sally is attacked and forced to run and be injured repeatedly for the final third of the movie. Every injury and scream requiring a close up of her face. Women’s deaths are drawn out and focused on while men are often killed quickly.