Acting Your Age: Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic

Abstract

Acting Your Age:Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic Adam Lowenstein (bio) There is no doubt that film critic Jason Zinoman put his finger on the pulse of something significant occurring in the horror genre when he published "Home Is Where the Horror Is" in the New York Times in 2018. The critical and commercial success of films such as The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) supports Zinoman's sense that "grown-up horror" was experiencing a "golden age," one where "adult anxieties" such as loss, grief, and mourning can take center stage in a genre that has tended to approach these issues only obliquely.1 In the years since Zinoman's important critical intervention, related discussions of "elevated horror" and even "posthorror" have become more commonplace.2 While I share Zinoman's view that the 2010s may well mark a new, more "elevated" period in horror's popular perception, I am less convinced that the 2010s generation is any more "grown up" than previous generations of horror films. I am thinking particularly of horror's 1970s generation, the era of John Carpenter, Bob Clark, Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, Stephanie Rothman, and George A. Romero. The 1970s generation has been rightly canonized by critics ranging [End Page 295] from Robin Wood to Zinoman himself for their landmark innovations in the language of modern horror.3 But can we call these 1970s innovations "grown up" in light of the 2010s or vice versa? Is grown-up horror the same as horror that acts its age by attaining some ideal level of maturity? And what would it mean for a horror film to "act its age" anyway? This essay argues that today's idea of grown-up horror is still ensnared in unresolved issues from criticism on 1970s horror, especially the distinction between social and psychological horror. For Wood, writing in 1979–1980, horror's growth from psychological to social concerns during the 1970s marks a new maturity in the genre. For Zinoman, writing in 2018, horror's growth from social to psychological concerns during the 2010s marks a new maturity in the genre. Attached to this social/psychological distinction are further splits between horror's collective/individual, explicit/implicit, and political/apolitical dimensions. I will contend that our understanding of horror comes of age when we cease dividing it between these poles of grown-up maturity and childish immaturity. What we need to do instead is recognize the ties that bind social and psychological horror in order to stop favoring one over the other. In its refusal to separate the social from the psychological, horror has always been a grown-up genre; it has always been acting its age. What remains is for us to catch up with horror by acting our age as critics and scholars of horror studies; we need to reframe the genre beyond preferences for social horror or psychological horror. And what better way to accomplish this task than by turning to two remarkable films from two different eras that each place aging itself at the heart of horror's significance? What George A. Romero's The Amusement Park (1973) and Natalie Erika James's Relic (2020) share, in addition to their masterful interweaving of aging and horror, is a commitment to accomplishing this interweaving by marrying the social to the psychological. What these films conjoin is what Robin Wood split asunder so influentially in 1980 when he characterized Romero's signature achievements as a progressive and even "revolutionary" horror director according to a division in his work between social horror and psychological horror.4 In "Neglected Nightmares" (1980), Wood provides a postscript to his landmark "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" (1979)—an essay that remains, even today, likely the single most influential piece of criticism on the horror film ever published.5 "Neglected Nightmares" devotes attention to several directors Wood feels he failed to give adequate consideration to in "An Introduction to the American Horror Film": Craven, Rothman, Clark, and, most significantly, Romero. In fact, Wood stakes [End Page 296] his first claim here...