Word Soup

I've always been amused at horror film plots that show young urban or suburbanites getting lost in redneck rural America. A rural America that's always devoid of value, but packed to the brim with madness (aka, they don't buy lattes and own lofts, and their cars are old). There's more there going on than just shitty writing, and I think Sam Miller captures some of it in a piece I spotted on Alternet:

"Rich city folks move out into the country and find themselves up against nasty poor locals and a ghost in another recent vengeful-spirit film, Wendigo. The more I thought about this recurrent motif, the more I realized: the modern haunted house film is fundamentally about gentrification. Again and again we see fictional families move into spaces from which others have been violently displaced, and the new arrivals suffer for that violence even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

This thriving subgenre depends upon the audience believing, on some level, that what "we" have was attained by violence, and the fear that it will be taken by violence. In the process, because mainstream audiences are seen as white, and because gentrification predominantly impacts communities of color, the racial Other becomes literally monstrous.

Given my girlfriend is working on a paper about displacement that she's presenting in Long Beach this weekend, I found this bit of interest as well:

"Displacement creates a paradox: We acknowledge the wrong that has been done but feel powerless to do anything about it. A sort of collective guilt springs up, a sense that we are insignificant cogs in the machinery of economic and social factors that create gentrification. This is particularly true for the middle class, who are often forced by economic necessity to move to gentrifying neighborhoods or to new suburban developments that have demolished pre-existing space."

I think he might be giving American culture more empathic credit than I would, as I doubt most Americans think twice about previous occupants. They're more worried about status, commutes, where the nearest Starbucks is and how much they'd have to pay to install new windows.

Still, I find the premise that our horror films are displacement guilt from gentrification or past collective wrongs (small pox infected blankets, anyone?) to be an interesting idea. Of course everyone knows that zombie films are about consumerism and the capitalist fear of the rise of the working class.... :)