Game over? The (re)play of horror in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S.

Abstract

Abstract Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S. (2007) is a meticulously faithful American remake of his European horror film of the same name, Funny Games (1997), which depicts the plight of a bourgeois family terrorized by two young men at their lakeside property. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it demonstrates how the film’s aesthetics of terror produces affective responses that undermine the characteristic emphasis on cathartic violence of the horror genre. Second, it addresses how the remake’s fidelity to the original prompts us to consider the transnational properties of representational violence. Retracing the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the ‘family in peril’ sub-genre of horror cinema, I first argue that Funny Games U.S. unsettles the viewer’s expectations by simultaneously exploiting and subverting generic conventions. Rather than resorting to spectacles of blood and gore, the film utilizes the affective potentialities of duration and self-reflexivity to rattle the audience and critique the viewing pleasure associated with representational violence. Next, I examine cinematic remakes as indicators of cultural variation, arguing that the minute differences of setting and characters between the original and the remake only aim to reinforce their similarities. In thus rendering the viewing experience almost identical, as mirroring and serial works, the films recast our understanding of the cultural specificity of spectatorship.