peg – Let’s all put our fingers in our ears and sing ‘LA LA LA LA’ in the hope that it will make the new ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ go away. Still it couldn’t be any worse than Neil LaBute’s ‘The Wicker Man’!

A remake of Last House on the Left?? Oh dear. Honestly, if anyone other than Wes Craven or Rob Zombie is doing it (I liked Zombie’s re-do of Halloween), it will most likely be unwatchable. I am certainly dreading Michael Bay’s proposed remake of Rosemary’s Baby.

My comments should be taken with a grain of salt as I’m certain you’ve spent more time thinking about this than I have.

To the second question about the genre’s self-consciousness and irony, PMRH (if I can shorten the genre) seem notable not because they’re self-conscious. Many modern horror films are that.

What makes them different is that they seem to be uniquely allusive to specific and highly restricted slivers of cinematic history. Many of the films aren’t just influenced by previous films, they make overt references in terms of music, dress, setting, and props. Unlike, say, torture porn or slasher revival flicks – which take familiar and update the context – many road movies seem to be made with the idea that the worlds in the films never progressed.

Both Zombie films supposedly take place in the contemporary moment, but the cars, clothes, and music are all “stuck” in the 1970s. Wrong Turn has a similar fetish for vintage cars. Both the House of Wax and Hills Have Eyes remakes stick their characters in nightmarishly preserved bubbles of 1950s Cold War Americana. 2001 Maniacs occurs in a very 1960s looking “preserved” section of the pre-Civil War South. Vintage muscle cars are all over Death Proof too. I can think of few po-mo horror flicks that are so deliberately tied to the look and period details of their predecessors.

I don’t know how “ironic” the genre is as a whole. There’s elements in The Devil’s Rejects, specifically the suicide dash at the end, that are extremely ironic. The reversal of the victim/predator relationship in Death Proof is another ironic bit. Mostly, thought, I’d say the self-consciousness of PMRH was more worshipful homage than ironic deconstruction (unlike, say, Scream).

Good luck with the thesis.

I hope you understand that the article was very good and I only had the minor disagreement with it. Well, I had one more in that I think the folks who post reviews at IMDB should be taken more seriously at times, but that’s a minor point.

I understand the difficult of sorting subgenres of film, particularly in horror. In my view road-horror does include a number of elements that make it postmodern, and when you consider the origins of the first cycle in the 1970s following on the heels of the turbulent 1960s, and its development in the contemporary late modernity or postmodernity, I think a good case can be made for situating this subgenre in this cultural and social context.

I hope to hear the thoughts of others.

The comments on ‘Jeepers Creepers’ are especially thought-provoking for me, as defining the group of films which form the subgenre is one of the more difficult tasks with any study of horror. Many of the subgenres are so similar, and it can seem futile to try and separate them or to force each film to fit into one or the other. I completely agree that ‘JC’ feels like two films pieced together, and for that reason I was disappointed by it – the first 20 minutes were terrifying, and then (for me, not being a monster movie fan) it all went downhill. The first 20 minutes seemed like pure road-horror, and I have included a discussion on it for that reason; chronologically, it is a precursor of the main body of the subgenre in its modern manifestation. However, it doesn’t correlate with the subgenre as well as other films.

The points made here about postmodernism are very interesting too. I wonder if I could ask the posters here: how much do you consider the road-horror to be a postmodern subgenre? How does its level of self-consciousness and irony compare with those of other contemporary horror subgenres?

Thanks for the thoughts here – I’ve got a lot to follow up on from this article, and I will keep checking out the rest of the site!

I found the article a bit difficult to read in its entirety; every other paragraph or so there is a line that has text that overlaps making it unreadable…

I wonder at the lack of discussion of Last House on the Left. I mean–??

Looking forward to reading this more closely and hoping for better readability of this journal in future!

You point stands. All these ill-fitting details do, as you suggest, make it harder to make the case that JC should be seen as the seminal MRH film.

I would say, however, that tracing the origins of something down to a sort of genetic level, finding tropes that may not be fully formed but that clearly carried on into later works, need not be understood in postmodern terms. I recently wrote a little bit about the origins of the Sweeney Todd story. There are several “proto-Sweeneys” that feed into the famed story, but few contain all the elements became iconic when they all came together. Though they’re “incomplete,” does that mean they don’t collectively form the “origins” of Todd? Critical theory aside, I’d argue that such an understanding better mirrors how artists actually work. They get influences from multiple places, take ideas from numerous works and sources, then fuse them together into something novel (if they’re good artists). But this is just an aside. Man, what were we just saying about straying from the way? These kids never learn!