Despite our innate instinct to survive and avoid threatening situations, humans have come to enjoy and even seek out thrilling and fearful experiences recreationally. From haunted houses to Hollywood horror, the adrenaline rush of jump scares and gore have become commercialized as a way to make money off of our desire for stimulation. One of these most lucrative domains, the film industry, has produced blockbuster after blockbuster to insight fear and unease in the audience, who hungrily consume the media content. With the invent of pervasive technology and rapidly shifting cultural attitudes, this genre of film has evolved into a more menacing, psychologically unsettling form. Postmodern horror, as described by Isabelle Pinedo in her piece “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film,” can be identified by five characteristics: the disruption of the everyday world, the transgression of conventional boundaries, concern for the validity of rationality, lack or narrative closure, and a bounded experience of fear (Pinedo, 20).In this way, the conventional horror trope of good conquering evil is replaced by a more ambiguous, unpredictable plot.
The horror genre has continued to change with the times, introducing “late-postmodern horror” in which fear stems from the unexpected, uncategorizable elements of the film. A work of late postmodern horror often includes the characteristics of an unbounded experience of fear, hypermediacy, self-reflexivity, and metalepsis. In particular, metalepsis, or the “transgression of boundaries between narrative levels or between the inside and outside of the text,” (Sample) has become a popular trope by which horror can instill in the audience an uncertainty about what is real and what is not. In this essay, I will explore and compare the use of postmodern and late postmodern horror elements in two works with the intention of highlighting the ways in which they differ and the overarching themes which they share.
Christopher Nolan’s Inception, often argued to be one of the most thought-provoking films of our generation, involves a story in which individuals can enter into and manipulate the dreams of others. There are levels to these dreams, such that you move further and further from the surface of reality as you dive deeper into the dream world. To reference a popular catch phrase regarding this film, the audience follows the characters as they experience the happenings of a dream, within a dream, within a dream etc. This film embodies and employs a number of Pinedo’s identified elements of postmodern horror, namely a disruption of everyday normalcy, the questioning of rationality, and a lack of narrative closure. In the film, characters are seduced from mundane, everyday life by the controllable, vibrate dream-reality. In fact, the dream worlds can so closely resemble reality that the Cobb, one of the main characters, cautions against the incorporation of real memories, as this is “the easiest way of losing your grasp on what’s real and what is a dream.” (Inception, 2010) In the name of rationality, you should always be able to tell what is real and what is not based on tell-tale markers. However, the construction of these “dream worlds” pull from the psychological content of the holder of the subconscious, such that reality and dream merge into an indistinguishable whole. Because rationality is no longer an effective means by which one can distinguish reality and fantasy, the characters each have a “totem” which signals to them which realm they are in. Cobb’s totem, a spinning top which once belonged to his wife (lost to the dream world), will spin endlessly if in a dream. This totem becomes particularly important at the end of the movie, which may be the most psychologically gripping and unsettling scene of the entire work. As the plot comes to a close, the characters successfully achieve their objective and emerge from the layers of dream realms. As the narrative follows Cobb and his pursuit of his goal to reunite with his children, it seems as though there will be a happy ending. However, as he returns, and we are witness to his emotional family reunion, Cobb puts his spinning top in motion on the table. Yet, Nolan plays the ultimate trick on the audience, as the scene goes black before we can see the top cease to spin. The one marker used to distinguish between dreams and reality is compromised by the reminder that we are the audience, viewing a snapshot of a story through a camera lens. This lack of narrative closure, wondering if Cobb has actually made it back or has just managed to enter another layer of dreams, coupled with the overt reminder that medium of this story is film, are two major elements of postmodern horror.
The second work which I will analyze is an episode of Black Mirror, a Netflix show written by Charlie Booker. This series is centered around the theme of technology advancing to the point where it turns sour, either taking over human nature or leading to its ultimate destruction. In the episode “Playtest,” a vulnerable American who claims to enjoy being scared participates in a beta test of a technologically advanced video game. This game uses the psychological content of the player to construct an individually catered horror experience, like the combination of a spider and an old bully.
However, the game takes a rapid turn, as the fear element of the game becomes unbearable for the character. Certain events take place, in which the ability to discern what is real or not real disintegrates. The game moves to use not only characters which take part in the everyday life of the player, but also incorporates tactile sensations such a touch and pain.
The are a number of scenes for both the player and the viewer which cannot be deemed “real” or “not real” until we are shown the comparison to actual reality. This is similar to the dream world of Inception, as dreams “feel real while we are in them. It is only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” (Inception, 2010)This is an overt use of Pinedo’s element of postmodern horror, that the validity of rationality is thrown into question in conjunction with a disruption of everyday life. Overtime, the psychological specificity of the game is too personal, and the player begs to be let out.
We see the player as he is removed from the game, and proceeds through a series of “waking-up,” until he is released to go home and return to his mom. The final minutes of the episode involve everyday elements, such as planes, flight attendants, the player’s home, and even his mother. This is as “real” as it gets, pulling from both unique sentimental aspects of life as well as generically “real” elements with which the audience can identify. However, it is not until the last 5 minutes of the episode, that it is revealed to the audience that the player never did make it home, but that he dies in the testing room. In this way, the audience experiences the majority of the episode thinking that, based on conventional rationality, the player is moving towards returning to the “real world” with a happy ending. The viewer is taken through a rollercoaster of levels, as they are time and time again shown that they are wrong—what they thought was finally “real” was in fact not.
Both of these media works employ postmodern horror elements, as identified by Pinedo, to instill in the audience an unsettling doubt of what is real, not real, and their ability to discern between the two. Yet there is an even greater overarching theme found in the comparison of these narratives: the use of a certain type of metalepsis. Instead of an intrusion of extradiegetic elements into the diegetic realm, the metalepsis “emerges not from the transgressed intrusion between the levels of ‘telling’ and ‘told,’ but from the interferences among the different levels of the ‘told.’” (Kiss, 37) In Inception, this is seen in the layers and layers of “dream” reality through which we follow the characters through the film. In “Playtest,” the different levels within the narrative occur as part of the player’s experience of the horror game. This form of metalepsis can be just as impactful, if not more so, than the typical form. In his analysis “Narrative Metalepsis as Diegetic Concept in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010),” Miklós Kiss explains the effect of metalepsis as seen in Inception. By layering diegetic levels within the same narrative, “the viewer becomes doubtful about the status of reality… the idea preys upon the sense that the metaleptic playfulness may transgress not only the story’s embedded levels, but the film’s diegetic frame too, triggering an outward, extradiegetic emotion that unravels baffling feelings in the viewer.” (Inception, 42) While this analysis is specific to inception, and the fact that the deepest level of the dream world could be reality and vice versa, this effect appears in “Playtest” as well. In the book Black Mirror and Critical Theory, by Angela M. Cirucci and Barry Vacker, the episode is described as “moving in the borderland between virtual reality, perception, and memory.” (Circucci & Vacker, 206). The numerous layers of “reality” which the player experiences could all feasibly be true reality, based on rationality and our perception of everyday life. Unlike Inception, where the audience is left without a final answer about reality, it is revealed to the audience in the last five minutes of the show that almost none of the narrative has been real. In the case of both of these works of post-modern horror, the same form of metalepsis instills in the viewer uncertain about the ability to tell what is real or fake, causing a ripple of existential questioning and fear even after the movie or episode ends.
The final point of comparison between Charlie Booker’s “Playtest” and Christopher Nolan’s Inception is the concept of time during the narrative. In recounting his prior experience in the dream realm, Cobb explains the dangers of going too far beneath the surface. He says, “I didn’t understand the concept that hours could turn into years down there, that we could get trapped so deep, that when we wound up on the shore of our own subconscious, we lost sight of what was real.” (Inception, 2010) In the dream world, the deeper you go, the farther away from real time you get. This time disconnect appears in “Playtest,” as the audience experiences what seems to be hours in the game, but in actuality is only a matter of seconds. In the last five minutes of the episode, the audience returns to the brightly lit test room, in contrast with the dark tones of the game-world. In this scene, the camera focuses on testing assistant as she records the data for the test, and under the duration, she types 0.04 seconds.
The hours and hours of time spent in these alternate realities, following the player through the video game, his layers of waking up, and his entire flight from the UK back to his home in the U.S., lasted less than a tenth of a second. Thus, in both media works, the most linear, constant aspect of reality is skewed such that we can no longer rely on it to contextualize our world. Above all other aspects of the media, this crack in the foundational concept of time is the most profound for the audience.
At the core of postmodern horror is the psychological, unnerving elements which stay with the audience beyond the jump scares and gore of conventional horror. In employing Pinedo’s postmodern elements of unbounded experience and the uncertainty of rationality in conjunction with diegetic metalepsis, the 2010 film Inception and “Playtest” shake the foundation of what the audience considers to be constant and non-negotiable: time. Our modern conception of time is linear, as its governance over days, months and years gives meaning to our experience on earth. However, the introduction of multiple narrative layers and the inconsistency of time rips out from under us the meaning of life as we know it. This form of existential fear and uncertainty, in my opinion, is the essence of late postmodern horror.