The Critical-Industrial Practices of Contemporary Horror Cinema
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Off-Screen Scares: The Critical-Industrial Practices of Contemporary Horror Cinema A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Joseph F Tompkins IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Richard Leppert, Adviser January 2013 © Joseph F Tompkins, 2013 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks to the many friends, colleagues, teachers, and family members who provided the necessary support and advice to usher me through both the dissertation writing process and my time as a graduate student. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee: Mary Vavrus, Gil Rodman, John Mowitt and Gary Thomas, for their lasting guidance, scholarly advice, and critical feedback. In particular, this project was hatched in Mary Vavrus’s Political Economy of Media seminar, and for that, I’m especially indebted. Also, to Gary Thomas, who taught me, among other things, the power of good, clean prose as well as the radical possibilities of making the classroom into a vitalizing, “heterotopian” space—a rampart against the “mechanical encrustation on the living.” I would also like to convey my sincerest appreciation to my mentor, Richard Leppert, who, since my earliest days as an undergraduate, has been a source of both professional guidance and companionship. Richard is my model—as an educator and a friend. I would also like to thank Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Robin Brown, Cesare Casarino, Liz Kotz, Keya Ganguly, Timothy Brennan, Siobhan Craig, and Laurie Ouellette for their sage advice during my graduate studies. Many friends and colleagues provided me intellectual and emotional support throughout the years: Mathew Stoddard, Tony Nadler, Alice Leppert, Manny Wessels, Mark Martinez, Doyle “Mickey” Greene, Kathie Smith, and Eleanor McGough. I am also grateful to my parents, Bud and Deb Tompkins; my brother Steve; and my Aunt Pat, for their enduring patience and love over the years. And finally, to Julie—you make all the difference. i This dissertation is dedicated to Jochen Schulte-Sasse, who taught me about the “structurality of structures” ii Abstract This project examines the marketing and reception discourse of contemporary horror cinema, exploring in particular how Hollywood’s “ancillary” media platforms (television, DVD, the Internet, and soundtrack albums) allow for new industrial strategies for mobilizing consumers. It considers how commercial practices of transindustrial synergy, branding, and repurposing affect the circulation and mediation of horror films, and how these practices in turn contribute to a host of new promotional forms (e.g., brand-name auteurs, corporate “re-imaginings,” soundtrack albums, conglomerated video-on-demand networks and web 2.0 sites), which are designed to manage an increasingly diversified field of niche markets. Accordingly, the dissertation explores the way the horror genre has increasingly come to function as a transindustrial site for organizing reception and consumer activities across multiple media platforms and entertainment industries. In doing so, it aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of how specific film genres are stabilized and reproduced by institutional discourses (critical, industrial, popular), which are in fact essential to the very existence of commercial-film categories. iii Table of Contents Introduction Horror Cinema/Synergy…………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One The Canonical Reading Formation (or the Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism).………………………………………………………………………………..42 Chapter Two Auteurs of Commerce: The Business of Performing Horror Authorship……………….73 Chapter Three “Reimagining” the Canon: The Franchise Reboot, DVD Culture, and the Discourse of Contemporary Horror Film Remakes…………………………………………………..130 Chapter Four What’s the Deal with the Soundtrack Album? The Customized Aesthetics of Contemporary Horror Film Music……………………………………………………...181 Chapter Five Horror 2.0 (On Demand): The Digital Convergence of Horror Film Culture…………209 Conclusion The Viral Future of Horror Cinema…………………………………………………….240 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………258 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..275 iv Introduction Horror Cinema/Synergy On September 10, 2010, the action horror film Resident Evil: Afterlife opened number one at the U.S. box office. The fourth installment in the Resident Evil franchise, the film tracks Alice (Milla Jovovich), the series’ heroine, as she moves across a post- apocalyptic desert landscape in search of the elusive Umbrella Corporation, a multinational bioengineering company responsible for unleashing a deadly zombie- generating virus that has spread across the globe and infected the bulk of the human population. Protecting a small cohort of survivors while fighting off a new breed of super zombies, Alice remains steadfast in her quest to wrest humanity from the precipice of extinction, while seeking to exact revenge upon the evil, omnipotent corporation whose noxious creation has spread everywhere, beyond the company’s control, threatening to consume the world over. Although the plot to Resident Evil: Afterlife merely appears to replicate the standard, formulaic scenario of countless apocalyptic horror film narratives, it might also stand in as an allegory for the media-industrial complex circumscribing the film’s release. Much like the mutating, deadly virus at the heart of the Resident Evil franchise, the film’s “content” had seemingly spread everywhere within the space of a few short weeks leading up to, and immediately following, Resident Evil: Afterlife’s box office release, thereby “infecting” a host of non-theatrical multi-media platforms. By the time the movie hit theaters in the fall of 2010, portions of the film—in the form of promotional images, clips, TV spots, director and star interviews, online games, licensed recordings, 1 theatrical trailers, and “behind the scenes” documentaries—could already be seen and heard circulating across a variety of media outlets (e.g., news and entertainment publications, broadcast network and cable television channels, online websites, soundtrack albums). Furthermore, the subsequent release of the film on DVD and Blu- ray provided additional sites for compounding ancillary revenues, while heightening a relentless viral marketing campaign designed to saturate various media markets and diversify audiences for the Resident Evil franchise as a whole. All of this goes without mentioning the eighteen-part Resident Evil video game-series upon which the movies are based, and which continues to spur a parallel media franchise of its own, consisting of Resident Evil-inspired action figures, animated shorts, novels, and comic books. All this is to say, then, that if we wish to account for Resident Evil: Afterlife as a cultural phenomenon, we must incorporate the wide swath of interactive formats, cross- promotional outlets, and merchandizing tie-ins that encompass the trans-media universe underwriting the Resident Evil franchise in its entirety. Situated within the context of media convergence, Resident Evil: Afterlife becomes an impressively distended trans- media monster; indeed, given the rapid proliferation of myriad “satellite” texts (Austin, 2002: 24) and discourses surrounding the film, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine where this particular brand of horror cinema ends and where the so-called “ancillary” markets and “secondary” content begins. My project examines the way such networks of multimedia convergence and auxiliary promotion have impacted contemporary horror cinema, focusing in particular on the institutional relations associated with Hollywood’s ancillary media platforms 2 (television, DVD, the internet, and soundtrack albums) and its more traditional avenue of exhibition: the theatrical release. I argue that these platforms increasingly allow for key industrial strategies of branding, synergy, and repurposing, which are in turn designed to regulate and contain a proliferating field of consumer activities. In other words, these media serve as the “host body” according to which numerous fields of consumer activity and reception practices can be brought into alignment with a studio’s “mutating” commodity discourses.1 These discourses, in turn, serve to regulate not only how, when, and where audiences access movies or the ways in which consumption takes place, but also the general conditions under which horror cinema’s ancillary promotions and “satellite” content circulates throughout film and media culture. Thus, I am interested in the ongoing institutional transformations of horror cinema, especially as these exist in relation to emerging media technologies, industries, markets, and audiences, but also how these “critical industrial practices” (Caldwell, 2006a) effectively work to manage and contain an increasingly diversified field of niche media markets through the organization and distribution of various modalities of consumption. Highlighting the shifting institutional relations that condition contemporary media production and consumption, my project thus engages research in political economy, textual analysis, genre criticism, and media reception studies. My primary concern is with the impact of non-theatrical media formats (TV, DVD, the internet, soundtrack 1 John Caldwell has described the “viral future of cinema” as one fundamentally dependent upon a variety of multimedia platforms and ancillary outlets (TV especially, but also DVD and the Internet); moreover, he writes that each of these platforms, and