The Modern British Horror Film

Steven Gerrard

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813579450
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

When you think of British horror films, you might picture the classic Hammer Horror movies, with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and blood in lurid technicolor. Yet British horror has undergone an astonishing change and resurgence in the twenty-first century, with films that capture instead the anxieties of post-Millennial viewers.  Tracking the revitalization of the British horror film industry over the past two decades, media expert Steven Gerrard also investigates why audiences have flocked to these movies. To answer that question, he focuses on three major trends: “hoodie horror” movies responding to fears about Britain’s urban youth culture; “great outdoors” films where Britain’s forests, caves, and coasts comprise a terrifying psychogeography; and psychological horror movies in which the monster already lurks within us.  Offering in-depth analysis of numerous films, including The Descent, Outpost, and The Woman in Black, this book takes readers on a lively tour of the genre’s highlights, while provocatively exploring how these films reflect viewers’ gravest fears about the state of the nation. Whether you are a horror buff, an Anglophile, or an Anglophobe, The Modern British Horror Film is sure to be a thrilling read.  
 

1

The Hooded Terror

In 2011, over a period of five hot and humid days in August, numerous cities in England underwent a period of genuine civil unrest. A supposed incident in the Tottenham suburb of London, in which police allegedly shot a suspected youth gang member, sparked a series of riots that soon spread from the capital to the Midlands and was widely reported in both UK and European news bulletins.

As Johnny Walker suggests, there were two key views as to why these riots became a symbol of a disenfranchised (primarily youth) “underclass” within Britain’s social structure (85). As early as 1990, Charles Murray had written that there was a distinct separation of this “underclass” from the rest of the majority of the UK populace, which followed over ten years of divisive Thatcherite, Conservative right-wing rule. Imogen Tyler (2013) suggests that the rise in gang culture, knife crimes, and inner-city violence was the result of this burgeoning cultural group becoming synonymous with both an unwillingness to work and being prone to using violence. Mass-media reports clearly blamed young, working-class people for the riots.

However, the disenfranchisement of this supposed “underclass” came to symbolize a culturally fractured Britain, in which it was becoming more and more apparent that poverty-stricken areas, low employment, poor infrastructures, failing educational establishments, and a lack of genuine opportunities for people in need provided the backbone and impetus for demonstrating the cracks running throughout the country. While the demonstrations were, as Walker points out (85–86), originally peaceful, the intervention of gangs and opportunists spiraled into five days of chaos, anarchy, and tension, reminiscent of the riots in Birmingham, Brixton, Toxteth (1981), and Broadwater Farm (1985) almost thirty years before.

With the media in full-on aggrandizing mode, one group of individuals were singled out for attention. They wore tracksuits and T-shirts and face-hiding hooded sweatshirts. These “hoodies,” as they became known, were apparently a cultural by-product of “broken Britain” but in reality came to symbolize the right-wing media’s view of everything that was anti-Conservative. When the Daily Mail reported that “streets, town centres and shopping malls do not properly belong to us and the hoodie [is] symbolic of those we fear have taken over” (“Under That Hoodie”), it was only a matter of time before savvy filmmakers would use this background of a splintered society to begin to question the moral fabric of a country fraught with tensions. And what better way to do it than through the horror genre?

As with any subgenre, it has to have a beginning. While earlier films such as The Damned (Joseph Losey, 1963) and Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam, 1979) offered depictions of a growing and dissatisfied youth culture in Britain in the postwar years and punk era, respectively, their modest links to the terrors of today’s movies can be seen. When comparing the teddy boys, mods, and rockers of yesteryear to the hoodie, Jane Graham’s article in the 5 November 2009 edition of the Guardian pointed out that hoodies

don’t have the pop-cultural weight of the other subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised fashion. Instead, they’re defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of the heap) and their social standing (. . . as being oppositional). Hoodies aren’t “kids” or “youngsters” or even “rebels”—in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly interchanged with (in order of popularity) “yob,” “thug,” “lout” and “scum.”

According to the media, Britain had become the target of feral gangs intent on destroying everything not like them. Walker suggests that the first “hoodie horror” has its origins in genre films like Donkey Punch (Oliver Blackburn, 2008), Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009), and The Reeds and Travellers (Kris McManus, 2011), which do not have hoodies in them per se but rather have young protagonists that create/react to violence (89–90). However, the art-house film The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (Thomas Clay, 2005), with its controversial, static single-shot rape scene, and the football-hooligan movie The Football Factory (Nick Love, 2005) do have hoodies and began to show the symbiotic link between the character and violence, with the garment symbolic of them both.

Arguably the first film to have a direct impact on the “hoodie horror” subgenre is the claustrophobic Euro thriller Ils (David Moreau and Xavier Palud, 2006), with its story of a young teacher and her husband who are terrorized in their own house. This persuasive film never reveals the motivation for its horrors, and the perpetrators remain anonymous until the last few frames of the movie. It was this enigmatically frightening approach to the hoodie that separated the European from the British oeuvre. For example, the Ils poster’s huge close-up of an eye remains ambiguous at best, whereas the poster for Cherry Tree Lane (Paul Andrew Williams, 2010) shows a black background, an open cottage doorway with flowers growing around it, a blood-stained set of handprints on the door, and a hooded figure with his back to the viewer, which immediately sets up both the atmosphere and the narrative of the film with some force. If one takes the poster of Cherry Tree Lane as an exemplar of the advertising of the cycle, it becomes apparent that with the stark warning of “No warning. No mercy. No escape” and media comments such as “the ultimate urban horror” and “visceral, brutal, terrifying” screaming out at the spectator, the “hoodie” became synonymous with terror and violence. When coupled with the popular press calling youths “feral,” “louts,” “chavs,” “yobs,” and “evil,” the “hoodie” automatically became a stereotype linking the films to their contextual world, where hoodies were portrayed as hanging around street corners, drinking, threatening, and creating fear for “ordinary” law-abiding citizens, much in the same way that Marlon Brando’s and James Dean’s teenage rebels had done in the 1950s (Bawdon; qtd. in Walker 88). While Matthew Turner would see the hoodie (both garment and wearer) as “a signifier of moral decline, ASBO culture and a general social downward turn.” James Murray, Dave Robbers, and Matt Drake’s inflammatory right-wing article “Should Hooded Youths Be Banned from Our Streets and Shops?” portrayed hoodies as rampaging gangs that brought terror and menace to the streets of the country, putting at risk the moral majority who wanted to be left to their own peaceful lives.

Interestingly, these peaceful lives were placed into two distinct locales: the (inner/working-class) city and its (middle-class) suburbs, and the countryside. When Andrew Higson wrote of “That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill” (153), he romanticized industrial landscapes, rows of factories, terraced houses, cobbled streets, washing lines, gunnels, and wash houses, helping to create a sense of contextual, nostalgic, and romantic “identity” within a film’s themes. Movies such as Heartless (Philip Ridley, 2009), F (Johannes Roberts, 2010), Cherry Tree Lane, Citadel (Ciaran Foy, 2012), Comedown (Menhaj Huda, 2012), and Community (Jason Ford, 2012) used the town/cityscape as areas of urban decay. While these films may begin with a skyline shot of London (as an example) with its landmarks both cementing the film into its geographical position and orientating the audience, they then proceed inward to the psychogeographical aspect of the films. That is, we experience the city through the eyes of the character(s). By using stock locations of everyday life, such as the high-rise, the public housing project, the school, and the shopping center, the horrors on display in these movies offer a genuine sense of concrete credibility because they look authentic, while also accentuating the often-implausible narratives into a form of believability.

As an alternative to Higson’s view, hoodie horror’s infrequent trips to the countryside, or at least areas of nature and parkland, reveal the flipside to the view that Britain is a green and pleasant land. By setting the film in a rural context, these country hoodies carried on where films such as the American Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and the British Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) left off. The main characters usually leave the comparative safety of the city only to be confronted with the smell, look, and feel of an alien environment. In Community, the run-down rural housing project is the place of nightmares, where the clashing juxtaposition of cultures blossoms into unrelenting violence. In Eden Lake, which will be analyzed further in this chapter, the countryside transforms from a place of beauty to one of threats and violence. It is this conflict of philosophies, outlooks, and morals that brings the two geographical and psychogeographical elements into sharp collision.

Whichever way the “hoodie” was seen, whether the films were set in the city or the countryside or in the day, night, or twilight hours, shrewd filmmakers used hoodies as a driving force in their movies, reflecting and commenting on the Britain of the new millennium. In order to both contextualize and critique hoodie horror as a genuine component of the modern British horror film, I now briefly analyze three movies.

Heartless was director Philip Ridley’s first film since The Passion of Darkly Moon (1995). The film made its debut at Film Four’s FrightFest (2009) and got a cinematic release on 21 May 2010. The main cast comprised Jim Sturgess (Jamie), Joseph Mawle (Papa B), former Doctor Who companion Noel Clarke (A.J.)—himself an exponent of inner-city living with Kidulthood (Menhaj Huda, 2006), Adulthood (Noel Clarke, 2008), and Brotherhood (Noel Clarke, 2016)—Clémence Poésy (Tia), Nikita Mistry (Belle), Luke Treadway (Lee), and guests Timothy Spall (George Morgan) and Eddie Marsan (Weapons Man).

The film uses the story of Faust as its base. Jamie is a lonely and troubled but likable photographer. At twenty-five, he is still a virgin, blaming a heart-shaped birthmark that covers half his face for his failure to get a girlfriend. At his studio, he meets an aspiring model, Tia, who is shocked by his facial disfigurement. As Jamie develops a set of photographs of buildings, he notices a lizard-like face peering out from one of the windows. Walking home, he sees a group of these lizard creatures standing around a fire. They turn and walk toward him, revealing huge, razor-sharp teeth. Over the course of a few days, more and more reports about Molotov-cocktail murders are reported in the neighborhood. The demonic gang attacks Jamie and his mother, setting her on fire. As Jamie recovers in hospital, he receives a phone call from Papa B, a man he has dreamt about. Papa B offers him a lifeline of Faustian proportions. Papa B tells Jamie that he will remove the birthmark from his face if Jamie carries out one act of violence for him.

The film garnered a mixture of both positive and negative reviews. Gary Goldstein enjoyed the film, calling it “a compelling psychological horror-thriller [that] contains a tremendous amount of heart.” He praised Jim Sturgess, calling him “a terrifically watchable presence”: his performance was both “moving and deeply sensitive.” Goldstein also found the overall atmosphere, plot, and direction compelling, “even at its most seemingly outlandish.” Kyle Smith gave a backhanded compliment to the movie. He felt that it was “an uneasy mix of B-movie shocks, social commentary and sentimentality” that contained “several delicious examples of Ridley’s macabre wit.” However, perhaps the review from Ben Rawson-Jones for Digital Spy is the most waspish: “Heartless? Gormless is a more apt description . . . thoroughly dull protagonist . . . more pathos for meat in a butcher’s shop window . . . form and content are desperately terrible.”

Despite this bashing, the film went on to be nominated for Best Film at the Sitges Film Festival (2009) and the Melies Award at European Fantastic Films Festivals Federation (2010). It won the Silver Melies Award at the Leeds International Film Festival (2009) and the Vision Award for Best Independent Feature Film at the Toronto After Dark Festival (2010), while Fantasporto awarded the film its Grand Prix, Best Director, and Best Actor accolades (2010).

The performance of Jim Sturgess is strong, and Jamie has been written and performed in such a way as to elicit sympathy from the audience. The director has assembled a good and believable cast. Timothy Spall plays Jamie’s father in his usual gentle, melancholic style, while Eddie Marsen’s all-too brief appearance as Papa B’s henchman remains a highlight of the film.

Ridley used his own compositions on the soundtrack (with his collaborative partner, Nick Bicât), which acts like a Greek chorus that both comments on the action and draws in aural links among the film, its characters, and the audience. Sturgess sang two of the film’s songs, with both him and Ridley seeing them as reflecting Jamie’s state of mind at various points of the film’s narrative.

While gore is minimized, two standout scenes remain genuinely disturbing. The first sees Jamie meeting Papa B in a run-down block of flats. The neon-lit walls are covered in dregs, and the floor is filthy. Papa B gives Jamie his ultimatum: do one work of chaos, and the birthmarks will disappear. Jamie succumbs to this temptation. Papa B gives him a Molotov cocktail; Jamie lights it, drops it to the floor, and is engulfed in flames. When the flames subside, Jamie slowly peels off his charred skin to reveal his new identity. As he unpeels his old self from his new, the skin both bubbles and cracks. The second, more aggressive sequence sees the return of Papa B, as Jamie cowers from him on a rooftop. Papa B calls to one of his reptile minions, who hands him A.J.’s head. A.J.’s eyes flicker open, and he screams in terror. Papa B lifts the head to his mouth and bites two huge, bloody chunk of flesh from A.J.’s cheek. Whereas Jamie’s killing of a male prostitute is blackly comedic, these two scenes remain horrific because not only are they treated with seriousness, but through the terrific combination of overbearing sound, lighting, and editing, the horrors for Jamie (and us) become all too apparent.

There are two very distinct ideas behind Heartless. The first is that the film offers a point of view that then–prime minister David Cameron’s “broken Britain” was not just the result of societal breakdown but arguably stemmed from the individual within that society. The film positions the hoodie as both Other and Us in distinct ways. Jamie wears a hoodie, and as his face is covered, he is technically a terror to society: he is Other. However, he also has a respectable, entrepreneurial job, lives with his mother, pays rent, is polite, seeks love, and strives for friendship: James is therefore Us. This duality remains at the core of the movie, in which Jamie crosses these borders with a mix of both pain and ease.

Like the monstrous, crawling, albino subhumans of The Descent, Heartless’s monster-hoodies are feral, violent, lizard-like creatures that use their hoodies to mask their reptilian features. They roam in packs, make shrill shrieking noises, and have sharp teeth, thus becoming the Other that terrorizes Us. But the normal-hoodies are also shown to be the kids of millennial normality: they play loud music, get shouted at by older members of society (who probably listened to music just as loudly), use the language of their generation, and remain part of a culturally familiar component of contextual Britain. When the mass media’s view of hoodies portrayed them as “wild packs of yobs” (Collins), whose “frightening, surreal and carnivalesque” (Tyler) nature caused them to be catalogued between the divide of “normality” and “otherness,” it becomes obvious that the hoodies not only symbolize the idea of a “broken Britain” but are also emblematic of it. It is these two viewpoints that lie at the heart of Heartless.

The second idea is that Ridley made the cityscape an integral part of the film’s overall meaning. There are establishing shots of London, including the City, the River Thames, and other ubiquitous heritage icons such as red double-decker buses and black taxis. However, when Ridley backs away from these tourist trappings, the London of heritage becomes what Peter Hutchings calls “London Horror,” which had been seen before in such movies as Michael Reeves’s The Sorcerers (1967), Pete Walker’s Cool It, Carol! (1970), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972).

The film’s opening scene is of nighttime London, where the bright lights of the city pierce the darkness. As the camera pans down to focus on a housing project, the sounds of cars, police sirens, and a voice shouting “You’re gonna fucking die!” bring the viewer sharply into the film. The lingering shots of lights flickering on and off in row upon row of apartment buildings, mixed with shots of the city, offer life and hope. But these are pushed away, changing to empty side streets, where rubbish is piled high up against graffiti-strewn walls. This is the London that tourists don’t see, and by focusing on these side streets (themselves becoming an allegory for horror films as being on the periphery of “acceptable” genre), the narrative removes the tourist trappings, replacing them with a locale that remains both ordinary and normal, while simultaneously corrupting and frightening.

While Jamie’s experiences appear to be hallucinatory and brought on by the constant bombardment of anti-hoodie n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Hooded Terror
• 2. The Great Outdoors
• 3. The Dead Inside, the Dead Outside, the Stranger Within
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Magazines, Films, TV Series
• Index
• About the Author