Spectacular Optics: The Deployment of Special Effects in David Cronenberg's Films (Critical Essay‪)‬

This cantankerous statement by David Mamet seems to serve as a perfectly suitable description of horror film. It criticizes a specific cinematic aesthetic that departs from the dramatic tradition which movies inherited from the theater--Mamet's primary profession before he started making movies himself. The reference to "carnival amusement" and the analogy with pornography place horror film in the tradition of "low" or socially dubious forms of entertainment, especially in regard to its audience's prurient interests and its risque or downright illicit subject matter. Thrills are primarily what horror film is after, which is hardly surprising given that the genre's name derives from the affective intentions it has on its audience--to make their hair stand on end. Viewers less scornful of cinematic thrills than Mamet might see in his observation that "films have degenerated to their original operation" (emphases added) not so much an indictment of certain kinds of film as a description of the very nature of cinema--that in some essential manner movies have always pursued an agenda different from that of the theater, or that the narrative and dramatic service into which great filmmakers have pressed the medium constitutes a refinement that could also be seen as an alienation of the medium from itself. Disagreements about personal value judgments aside, Mamet is correct in positing formulaic predictability at the heart of most horror films. As their plots go, horror films tend to be "generated from a very limited repertory of narrative strategies" (Carroll 97). They follow rigidly scripted, almost ritualistically formal routines in order to get to their affective point--the delivery of thrills. From Abbot and Costello movies and Young Frankenstein to Scream and Scary Movie, this adherence to convention might explain why horror films make parody a cinch. Like action films moving from one scene of spectacular mayhem to another, martial arts films moving from one battle scene to another, and hardcore pornography moving from one explicit sexual encounter to another, the plot twists of most horror films function as mere transitional devices that move the audience from one thrill to another.