Uncanny Reflections: How Past Terrors Haunt Modern New Horror Cinema

Part One

Nosferatu reaching out his heart-stopping hand via Robert Eggers’ upcoming remake of the silent classic to grip the hearts of a new generation is not the only shadow of the past arising during the current renaissance of sophisticated scares. Movies like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria or The Lodge by Austrian directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala testify to a macabre recurrence of morbid motifs from early European speculative films. Some referential contemporaries evoke distinct characters like Jennifer Kent’s pathologic parenting parable The Babadook did with its titular villain: Dr. Caligari’s top-hatted, cloaked silhouette overstepping from sharp-shadowed expressionist storybook-setting into a reality which might be lunatic delusion. Some reassemble structural, visual and narrative tropes like Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night with its black-and-white landscape of urban despair, preyed upon by vampiric and human bloodsuckers.

Some recreate a specific scenery and mood like Trey Edward Shults’ gloomy tale of moral breakdown in a setting of bottled-up paranoia, pain and pestilence, It Comes At Night. Or they establish similar settings where the occult, egregious parades in broad daylight like Midsommar’s world of unflinching brightness is reminiscent of the hazy sunshine in Vampyr. Others dive into the stylistic peculiarities, sinister themes and sardonic mannerisms of their predecessors, like The Lighthouse. A preliminary paradigm of retrospective attributes, Robert Eggers’ sailor’s yarn about doubles, drink and damnation marks the ever increasing immediacy of this trend. Said revival of a specific mode is not driven by fashionable revisionism or arbitrary nostalgia but outside historic forces – much like the classic canon that modern horror cinema innovators draw from. For their semblance and the feelings they triggered those classic films may be labeled uncanny. This denotation also addresses their origin in the artistic traditions of Dark Romanticism, a style period which anticipated defining tropes of uncanny cinema. Dark Romanticism’s obscure, often sexually charged imagery, exalted scenery and metaphysical subjects directly inspired groundbreaking early European filmmakers. To understand their work’s influence on the present requires a closer look at its spooky sources.

What is uncanny?

In visual art a scenario becomes uncanny by slightly deviating from the reasonable, natural and cozy towards the abnormal, phantasmal and fear-inducing. Though uncanniness may erupt into horror, it isn’t pure fright. Rather it is a feeling of eerie oppression, amorphous danger and inconclusive disruption of what is accepted as physical order. Uncanniness requires a sense of comfort and conversance infringed. Uncanniness marks not the presence of a certain emotion (such as fear) but the lack of a feeling of safety and familiarity. Derived from the German unheimlich which contains heimlich/heimelig – describing something as snug and secure just like at home – “uncanny” literally means “un-homely.” Oh so homely was the prissy, prudish German Biedermeier period, to the moralist repression of which the late 18th-century art trend of Dark Romanticism or Schauerromantik (“Eerie Romanticism”) built an imaginative antidote.

Obsessed with death, drugs, decay, occultism, melancholia, lust, gloom, mania, mysticism, paranormality, sin and evil, it used the idyllic ideals and sentimental settings of the waning Biedermeier era as foil for sinister devices. Hereby, Dark Romanticism made its primary motif the uncanny. This trend, rich in unsettling fancies and emotional extremes, is condensed in one image: the often-reproduced “The Nightmare” by Swiss-British painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli). Several versions of the breathtaking artwork exist. A copy allegedly even adorned the Vienna flat of Sigmund Freud. When Freud’s formative essay on the uncanny was published, Europe’s film creatives had already taken a vivid interest in the theme and its artistic expressions. The Eerie Romanticist’s twisted imagination came to life on the first movie screens as those filmmakers saw the world around them come out of joint.

“Terror is not of Germany” … or is it?

The uncanny is the clue to a chamber of screen horrors dating back to an era of unemployment, economic depression, pandemic diseases, social instability and power-hungry populism. In the years preceding the First and Second World War, ever-increasing public angst channeled a range of films ghostlier, bleaker and stranger than what would later be known as sci-fi, fantasy or thriller. The Student of Prague (1913) captured audiences as much with its dramatic and technical ambition as with Dark Romanticist tropes, a haunted atmosphere and picturesque pessimism. Such characteristics would prove formative for a vein of macabre movies indirectly addressing widespread fears. Need for escapism drove people into movie theaters. Here their inner demons were visualized as actual demonic creatures. Alienation, defenselessness, resignation and self-estrangement took the shapes of revenants, somnambulists, doppelgänger and vampires. Uncanny film originated in Germany as everyday life became evermore unpredictable. Yesterday’s hard-earned money was worthless today, fellow humans were seen as harbingers of infectious death, a newly established republic was rapidly failing and the horrors from the first industrialized war’s battlefields came home in the shape of traumatized minds and gruesomely disfigured bodies.

What had been secure, dear, familiar was suddenly unsound, disturbing, suspicious. Reality itself was uncanny, therefore uncanny fiction provided a pattern of identification. Furthermore, it offered arbitrary culprits and causes for people’s misery. Classic uncanny cinema is marred by a retrogressive stance regularly obscured by stylistic progressiveness. Casting mysterious strangers and social outsiders with far-fetched names as devious transgressors of social, natural and “divine” laws and thereby as uncanny fanned the xenophobia and nationalism fueled by WWI. Depicting variance, artistic inclination and lax morals as agents of monstrosities, madness and murder further seized on sentiments fostered by draconic measurements taken to counter the Spanish flu. Basic human needs and individual freedom had been branded as irresponsible and decadent. Doctrines of people’s health, unquestioning obedience and enforced assimilation were soon to be reactivated by the rising Nazi party. The contradiction of avant-garde artwork and bigoted bias is epitomized by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Aligning with the fascist agenda uncomfortably well, the plot equates the people with lunatics in need of corrective force. Ironically, despite its pivotal message and accurate perception of the German’s command-subservient tendencies Caligari itself ended up banned for its expressionist aesthetic.

At the violent end of a short-lasting phase of relative artistic and personal freedom which had been misjudged for general open-mindedness, German cinema – uncanny, expressionist and otherwise original – was killed off by officially approved and dull propaganda. As Nazism drove away artistic talent, the distinctive uncanny vibe arrived in burgeoning Hollywood. US genre movies focusing on terror and body horror presented a fascinating counterpoint to the ambiguous, phantasmal emphasis of their European equivalents. However, after a few captivating amalgams of the contrasting modes like Mad Love or The Black Cat, the uncanny evaporated. Much like US paranoid thrillers of the 50s or disaster movies of the 80s, this trend was a symptom of its day and place. Detached from both, it disappeared. The looming WWII curtailed Europe’s film industry–especially unsettling productions. The last pre-war uncanny film The Dybbuk now seems heavy with gloomy foreboding of impending death and devastation. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, that “horror is not of Germany but of the soul.” In 1945, the year the British Dead of Night became the first post-War and last classic uncanny film, Poe’s observation seemed only half true. Germany never recovered from its hostility towards the arts. And the uncanny film canon it once ignited appeared quaint and pale against the trauma inflicted upon humanity.

Part Two

While uncanniness flares up here and there in films like The Haunting, Eyes without a Face or Don’t Look Now, only recently did it emerge as a distinctive pattern in a number of ambitious modern horror productions. This is a trend all the more intriguing for its social and historical background as well as the unique subtextual twists it lends to classic uncanny tropes and themes. Almost a century after The Student of Prague initiated the old canon, the modern uncanny period was set off with two films premiering at the same festival. Jennifer Kent’s Babadook sneaks out of a Caligaresque children’s book into an overwrought single-mom’s home. But the intensely uncanny here is not the common haunted house trope but the shifting presentation of the mother and her demanding son. Both are alternately hinted at being in league with the Babadook, which is clearly an embodiment of helpless anger. Just whose anger exactly remains provocatively vague in a story which is at times that of a devoted parent plagued with a demonic offspring or that of a frightened boy threatened by his mentally unstable mother. The monster’s unmistakable appearance highlights the expressive chiaroscuro setting. Simultaneously, the Caligari-dress-up emphasizes motives of deluded distortion and personal perspective in Kent’s story, essential plot aspects of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

A similar concomitance of visual, stylistic and narrative clues distinguishes Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. The titular protagonist is a perplexingly humane vampire in a town populated with parasitic, often vicious humans. This inconsistency of literal and symbolical definition of “monster” creates uncanniness interwoven with melancholia, both core attributes of Dark Romanticism. A Girl further links to the past uncanny period by recalling street movies. This short-lived German silent sub-genre capitalized on preconceptions of big cities as dens of vice and venture, exploiting melodramatic misadventures of metropolitan lowlifes. Amirpour, though, opts for an escapist defeat of urban squalor by reversing the ending of Nosferatu. Murnau’s classic punishes with daylight death the multiple transgressions between a foreign, pestilent bloodsucker and a bourgeoise, self-sacrificing housewife. However, the Girl and her quarry drive off into protective obscurity. Suggesting all hierarchic, economic and physical gaps could be overcome if only the society constructing them was renounced, A Girl marks modern uncanny film’s rejection of those conservative standards their classic predecessors enforced.

The Student of Prague (both versions), The Golem: How He Came into The World and The Dybbuk caution against the crossing of classist, ethnic and religious lines as doomed and deadly. The Golem’s slumping lifeless to the ground, disempowered by a blond (implicitly Christian) child after stepping outside the ghetto, would feel like a relief to a target audience inculcated with paranoid fear of Jewish empowerment. Nosferatu’s cremation assured that touching an honorable woman only with his shadow would prove fatal for any foreigner. And the poor Student of Prague would literally kill himself over pining for an aristocrat. In contrast, contemporary uncanny films portray comparable transgressive acts as empowering– deadly not for the transgressors but the persons restraining them. In modern storylines it is no longer nonconforming individuals who have to be extinguished from society like broken parts from a smoothly running machine. The casualties in The Witch, Us and Midsommar clearly represent reactionary institutions overthrown by characters who permanently escape their abusive structures. The more privileged the audience, the uncannier this significant shift would feel.

Social, ethnic and religious repression has regularly been and continues to be set up as natural order. An uninvited ascension of the disenfranchised – as orchestrated literally in the finale of The Witch – presents a happy ending for the downtrodden. At the same time, to the entitled it represents the uncanny breach of a social law (and narrative convention) as certain as gravity. Equally divisive in their uncanny effect are Suspiria, The Lodge and Us, all centering in varying degrees around the emancipation of a subdued main character. Inverting predefined narrative imperatives is part of an astute critique of formerly sacrosanct tropes: the system and the pillars upholding it – family, religion, authority. The family unit and its residence, connoted cabalistic, haunted and degenerate by The Golem, Vampyr and Chute de la Maison Usher, breed not only otherworldly evil but also worldly fanaticism. Here, aggressive piety becomes more perilous than the Christian brand of sinfulness. The Lodge as well as The Witch deconstruct both spiritual and biological family, laying bare their propensity for guilt-tripping vulnerable individuals into violence and self-harm. Pointing out people’s susceptibility to indoctrination and religious misguidance, Hereditary sardonically dismantles socially imposed family values by resurrecting the eradicated kinfolk as walking dead devil-worshipers. Home, traditionally perceived as safe and familiar, has by overstating those aspects inverted from sanctuary to source of danger. Now, the home is essentially un-homely. Consequently, the other/s of modern uncanny cinema are the principal protagonists themselves.

New Nightmares

Essentially, uncanniness has been transformed from invasive threat to pervasive potential. This marks a fundamental conversion reflecting both the heightened diversity of modern uncanny cinema’s creatives and identification with progressive forces fighting for social justice. A century ago, uncanny cinema translated the angst directed against impulses of necessary change in a reactionary, repressive system. Today, uncanny cinema incorporates fears of a repressive system and this system’s aggressive resistance to overdue change. This perspectival shift manifests in distinctive narrative attributes. Evil isn’t vanquished: even if it is momentarily repelled, it remains a threatening presence. Monsters don’t get defeated – because monsters are relative in a monstrous world. Outsiders aren’t exorcised from wholesome communities, for the communities are unwholesome and their misfits might just be (to paraphrase Jordan Peele) Us. Those characteristics increase a sense of ambivalence and continuance. Past uncanny plots, usually reaffirming established principles, provided closure. In contrast, modern uncanny plots often suggest that their stories – just like the struggles informing their subtexts – aren’t finished.

It is the coalescence of historic awareness and topicality making present uncanny cinema equally relevant and effective. Its analogues are more than mere reminiscence. They, too, are symptoms of their times. Times of unemployment, economic depression, social strife, pandemic diseases and populism, fit to induce an experience of precariousness just as unsettling as was the era of the first uncanny features. The willful chills of these old movies may have faded, but in exchange they acquired subtextual chills. Mournful evocations of the persecuted as in The Dybbuk or Dead of Night’s tormented recapitulation of permeating trauma function as oblique mementos. Cinematic uncanniness in this context works like a seismograph for coincidental socio-political tremors. Artistic parallels visualize discomforting historical parallels while simultaneously recalling the mind-set of that time – a mind set to which present-day society seems to drift relentlessly. By adapting idiosyncratic genre characteristics, modern uncanny cinema not only pleasantly frightens but points out a resurgent socio-dynamic momentum and its destructive potential.

While the conclusion to this captivating contemporary canon remains to be seen, the classic canon closed on a note equally disturbing and self-reflective. Dead of Night ends with the protagonist waking up from a nightmare he can’t quite remember. Then he proceeds to literally go down the doomed path he took in his dream. It is with the same obliviousness that we set out to our own designated déjà-vu with a past we haven’t even left behind us. Tellingly, we never learn if Dead of Night’s main character actually follows his ill-fated course to the fatal final or if maybe he acts on his hunch of uncanniness and takes a turn in another direction. We are simply left to assume that, as the dream events unfold, he will do as he did before. Because that’s just how people are. After all – as the revival of uncanny cinema reminds us – history doesn’t repeat itself on its own. It’s people who repeat history. A fact that itself is uncanny.

Check out Lida Bach’s recommendations for the 10 Classic Films that will lead you on an exploration of the uncanny.

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Lida Bach is a professional movie journalist and critic from Berlin, having been published and publishing in numerous online media. She has also written for Horror Homeroom on “10 Classic Films to Unlock the Uncanny.” You can check out her website, Cinemagicon, and find her on Twitter.

 

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