It’s a late fall night in 2012 and I’m walking out of a movie theater while wearing a banana costume. As my costume-clad friends and I head to our cars to go home after an excitement-filled day, I couldn’t help but feel let down with how it ended. Spending time with friends is always amazing, of course, but the way we decided to finish our night was to pay $15.00 admission to watch (what I would consider to be) a sub-par horror movie that we all knew was coming. I don’t mean this in a bad way, because Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) thoroughly entertained me for its hour and a half runtime; the problem I had with the movie was that I spent exactly zero minutes of it being scared. Unsurprisingly, this was also the sentiment of audience members and critics alike. Many people looked down on this installment of the series for having no point or lesson to the story, but there are still ideas to unpack and lessons to be learned, especially when put in comparison to other works within the genre. As the 2010’s progressed and the era of Netflix was ushered in, many more of these types of horror films came out, hoping to capitalize on the online platform that provided them more creative freedom when it came to what they were allowed to show on screen.
A few gems have stood out, however, with one of them being Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018), based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 postmodern-gothic horror novel of the same name. Flanagan had his work cut out for him in bringing a critically acclaimed classic into the twenty-first century, yet was still able to produce content that was critically acclaimed in its own right. In contrast to the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Haunting not only kept me enthralled through each of its 10 one-hour episodes, but it also made me feel truly scared every time. Although both of these works deal with a haunted house, they do so in very different ways. The shared aspect of a haunting provides a great starting point to examine how each series uses the supernatural to explore aspects of the natural world.
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One of the most distinct differences between the franchises is the type of horror that it is able to produce for its audience. Viewers of The Haunting have likely witnessed the eerie visuals that seem carefully yet casually placed in the periphery of shots. Statues, figures, and even ghosts will appear, disappear, or change between shots of the same scene. Two examples have been provided above, try to find the creepy ghosts! Out of the dozens of times this happens throughout the series, the majority of them are never even acknowledged by the characters. They are not irrelevant to the plot, but they are also not an immediate concern either. They are simply there to act as Easter eggs full of suspense. This is all partnered with the actual plot that deals with psychological traumas of childhood hauntings and the demons of the real world. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, became riddled with jump scares in order to maintain its scary yet safe status as a horror blockbuster. In a film that seemed to be experiencing franchise fatigue, some of these jump scares almost appeared ironic as they called back to earlier installments of the series or made fun of the fact that a jump scare was being used in the scene.
So why is any of this important? These two films represent the difference between surprise and suspense, something that Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, has exemplified and explained masterfully throughout his career. This is also representative of something bigger than directing techniques, however, as it represents a distinct cultural shift in the way we utilize technology. Paranormal Activity’s use of sudden and intense jump scares is indicative of the shortening attention spans among people during the rise of smartphones in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. Production companies appear to have thought that the audience needed to see something scary more frequently than before, or else they would lose interest in the movie. It utilizes technology heavily as laptops and smartphones are the “found footage” which we are supposed to be watching. Furthermore, having an invisible antagonist meant the directors could not directly show the ghost creating a suspenseful scene—they effectively limit themselves to scares that involved either no setup or very little setup. The Haunting, however, comes after the wave of smart technology invading everyone’s lives, but at a time that is still dominated by online media consumption. Because of their distribution platform, the directors knew their audience was not limited to a one-time theater viewing that had to be constrained to a maximum of two hours. Instead, they recognized that people were now using the internet to cope with internalized struggles and had an entire season of a show to draw out these conversations in order to create a subtler sense of fear that lasts well after the credits roll.
Isabel Pinedo states “Horror is an exercise in recreational terror,” as she explains how postmodern horror films explore the “terror implicit in everyday life” and the repression of this terror in everyday life (Pinedo, 24-25). For The Haunting, this is the entire premise of the show. Mike Flanagan has revealed in interviews that his adaptation was essentially a show about characters of a horror movie after the film ends (Flanagan). As each of the main characters grows up in Hill House, their experiences and tragedies there haunt them later in life. They are not scared of those monsters anymore, but they are scared of their own lives due to the lasting effects of their own traumas. Their inner demons during adulthood (like drugs, depression, and unhealthy repression) are clearly connected to the literal demons and spirits that ruined their childhoods. This is how the show really sets itself apart from others, as it deals with very serious and terrifying topics that many will face in their own lives, while connecting everything to what seem to be classical horror monsters that could never be defeated. The main conflict of the show is exactly what Pinedo says postmodern horror is about: the terror implicit in everyday life.
Conversely, Paranormal Activity’s use of technology is what reveals the horror in everyday life. The movie is essentially a “found footage” film, with all of the footage being recorded by iPhones, MacBooks, and XBOX Kinects. After the film’s release, many people simply did not see an overarching message that the movie was trying to convey. This is a sin that can be forgiven due to the film’s lack of surviving characters or unsatisfying character arcs. What most people failed to consider, however, was the medium through which they were viewing the characters. In the movie, technology is what forces the audience and the characters to see the horrors present within their own home. The ghosts may be invisible and nobody believes anecdotal evidence of supernatural events, but the Kinect and laptops cannot be ignored when they capture the silhouette of a small boy or objects being thrown across rooms. This kind of presentation exemplifies the terror in everyday life by connecting the idea of violent supernatural beings to the common technology that audience members likely already posses. As clichéd as the “found footage” trope had become by 2012, this use actually seemed a little refreshing as the medium was an integral part in making the horror of the movie seem more real. It wasn’t the content itself that made the film scary, but rather the media through which we are presented the film’s contents.
These two franchises represent two completely different kinds of postmodern horror. The versatility of the supernatural horror genre is on full display here, as it is used in original Hollywood blockbusters and adaptations of old classics. Each film was also subjected to its own unique societal understanding of horror as a genre, thus forcing the production teams to approach their topics in interesting and creative ways. These series also also exemplify the most important aspect of horror films: their relationships to society and each other. Horror films are products of their time and are representative of topics or problems that societies face. Every film brings something to the table, so each film will have the opportunity to remain relevant in the realm of horror film. To simply overlook a bad scary movie because it is not scary enough is to miss out on an opportunity to learn about the people that made it. Furthermore, it is important to remember that these films can bring ideas out of each other, too. In this case, the two works highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s method of horror, while still covering two completely different sets of ideas. This is simply one of the major advantages that came with the advent of postmodernism and the explosion of the internet.
Works Cited
Flanagan, Mike. Interview by Simon Abrams. Vulture Magazine, 12 October 2018. https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/haunting-of-hill-house-netflix-mike-flanagan-interview.html
Hitchcock, Alfred. “Alfred Hitchcock Explains the Element of Suspense.” Keynote Speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6folAgGRU&frags=pl%2Cwn
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Paranormal Activity 4. Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Performances by Stephen Dunham, Katie Featherson, et al. Paramount Pictures 2012.
Pinedo, Isabel. “Recreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688091.
The Haunting of Hill House. Directed by Mike Flanagan. Performances by Henry Thomas, Carla Gugino, et al. Amblin Television and Paramount Television 2018.