Horror Week 1: Isolation
Welcome to the first week of Horror Month! Sorry, I couldn’t think of a better title for this series, what with it being the third year and all, but I’ve never been great at names.
Horror Month is something that I started on a whim in 2020 to showcase some of my favorite films in celebration of the season. What started as a fun little thing has turned into a years long obsession.
I wanted to do things a little different this year, something a tad bit more productive that would allow for more analysis of the genre. I will continue the daily movie recommendation on my Instagram, but each is be part of a weekly theme that I will write about in more critical and person depth in the newsletter. They will also include a preview list of the films mentioned that week.
The first week will begin today, Saturday, October 1st, but all other newsletters will come out on Sunday.
Essentially, I set out to make this system easier on myself. All I did was add more work to my plate, but it brings me joy! I’ve had so many DMs, “Liz, I hate horror, but I love the posts.” And that is what it is all about—entertaining innocent bystanders with my weird obsessions.
If you are interested in the 2020 and 2021 picks, they are saved as stories on my Instagram.
Also of note: there are a few repeat films from past years.
Let’s begin!
It was inevitable that someone would try to capture the horror of quarantine.
You may have noticed a sparse aesthetic in new films and television—more interior scenes, smaller casts, less on location, more green screen. A lot of these choices are due to safety concerns and cost.
This leads to unexpected challenges for filmmakers and has resulted in some interesting creative choices and more internally driven plots.
A group of teens on a road trip end up in a cannibal-ridden town; a couple stumbles upon a cursed tomb in the middle of the jungle; one sorority girl is left in the house while her sisters are at a party. No cell service. Slashed tires. The doors are all locked, and the sun is setting fast. The illusion of modern convenience, shattered.
Away from civilization, our characters often make desperate (stupid) decisions: walking up to the dark house on the hill; abandoning the car on the side of the road; renting a room in the out-of-date motel; or, splitting up in search of help.
All the above mentioned scenarios are tropes of the genre. (I will talk a lot about tropes over the next few weeks.) Tropes are a vital component of every genre in all forms of storytelling because they are light posts that guide through the darkened path of the plot, setting the boundaries of our expectations.
When done correctly, they lead to satisfactory ends because the work meets the set rules or by subverting the rules completely. For example: in a romantic comedy we have the expectation that a couple will meet, followed by a comedy of errors and misunderstanding, only to end up happily ever after.
There is no difference between the equation to a rom-com and horror. You’re just entering different numbers.
Isolation is not just a trope of horror but often a requirement—it’s easier for the serial killer or ghost or clown or alien or witch or sea monster or demon or child or tanning bed to kill you—but it is not just about logistics. There is something evolutionary scary about hearing an unwanted sound when we are alone. Is it friend or foe or is it just a trick of the imagination?
The house is creepier when it is empty. Without the light and sound pollution from town, our minds start to fill in the gaps. Sometimes the gaps look back.
Carol Clover explored this in her landmark text, Men, Women and Chainsaws, the sub-genre of city versus country. In her work, Clover cites 1972’s, Deliverance, as a prime example of the internal and external struggle between city and country.
Often this struggle is between what wo/man creates—architecture, progress, capitalism—and what wo/man leaves behind—naturalism, spiritualism, intimacy. In our great pursuit of revolutions and G Wagons, we forget about our connection to our evolutionary roots. This is why in films that cast a human threat they are often “folk”, small minded, territorial, as with the hillbillies from Deliverance.
Often, these stories of isolation are the push of the city on the country—how ill prepared we are for a night without fire—but I am primarily interested in how that thought could be extended to technology and the internet, where physical proximity is not a requirement. One prime example is We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a short, yet terrifying, look at internet trends found on sites like Creepypasta, an online encyclopedia of urban legends and dark web figures.
Our main character is Casey, a lonely girl who spends most of her time watching Youtube, and she takes part in a viral trend called “The World’s Fair”. Think, bloody Mary in front of a mirror but the Gen Z update. Afterwards Casey slowly descends into psychosis or is genuinely haunted, depending on what the audience chooses to believe.
I cannot stress enough how small this film is. There are only two characters depicted outside of web videos—the main character and JLB, a much older man, who has a questionable friendship with the minor. They interact online, connected by their loneliness and interest in creepy online content.
There are a handful of sets, but they are all rooms in their respective houses. We hear the girl’s father through the walls, but we never see him. The mother is presumed dead. Casey has no friends, no siblings. She goes to school, but she never carries any of the outside world back when she returns to her true reality of the internet.
For just over an hour, you never see one physical interaction between Casey and JLB or between them and their family members. We only glimpse the lives of the people they live with through framed photos and coats hung off chairs. No soundtrack. No special effects. With very little, the filmmaker creates claustrophobia out of their paired loneliness.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and other picks on the list like Host and We Need to Do Something were created in quarantine, but there are plenty of other films that capture the horror of physical, emotional, or cultural isolation.
My personal favorite on the list are Watcher and Host. Watcher explores how female intuition is often ignored and the cultural alienation of moving to a new country. While Host, in my opinion is the only good film that is explicitly set in 2020, is about a group of friends unwittingly summoning a demon during a Zoom séance. You know, a typical quarantine activity.
Left to our own devices, the mind wanders, imagination becomes the enemy. With the added filters and selectiveness of being perpetually online, our understanding of reality narrows into a singular path. Finding oneself alone and defenseless feels like the antithesis to the internet age, but, in fact, the feeling of connection and isolation often run tangentially.
Isolation Picks:
Deliverance (1972)
We’re All Going to the World's Fair (2021)
Watcher (2022)
Berlin Syndrome (2017)
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
We Need to Do Something (2021)
The Ruins (2008)
Host (2020)
Let me know if you give any of the films a try!