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 \u201cRecreational Terror: Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The horror genre has continued to change with the times, introducing \u201clate-postmodern horror\u201d 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 \u201ctransgression of boundaries between narrative levels or between the inside and outside of the text,\u201d (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.<\/p>\n
Christopher Nolan\u2019s Inception<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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 \u201cthe easiest way of losing your grasp on what\u2019s real and what is a dream.\u201d (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 \u201cdream worlds\u201d 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 \u201ctotem\u201d which signals to them which realm they are in. Cobb\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n