Horror Film by Murray Leeder

Author:Murray Leeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Pathologized audiences, victimized audiences

At times, horror’s viewers have been disparaged as immoral, and even demonized. A great example is Roger Ebert’s 1980 review of I Spit on Your Grave, which says relatively little about the film and quite a lot about its audience. Ebert begins by noting the venue: ‘It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theatres … but it is.’ He describes seeing the film at 11.20 am on a Monday, facing a crowd that was not just large but ‘profoundly disturbing … the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals’ (n.p.). A big ‘if’ indeed, with the odd implication that it is possible to be a real vicarious criminal to a fictional crime.

Ebert describes witnessing laughing and cheering. He notes a middle-aged, white-haired man greeting the film’s interminable rape scenes with cries of ‘That was a good one!’, ‘That’ll show her!’ and ‘I’ve seen some good ones, but this is the best!’ He also notes a woman in the audience who praises the heroine’s revenge killings, shouting, ‘Cut him up, sister!’, but wonders if she was appalled by the protracted rape scene needed to set up her vengeance. He places considerable focus on condemning not only the film itself, but its exhibitors and viewers, noting that he left the film ‘feeling unclean, depressed and ashamed’ (n.p.).

Ebert spoke again about this screening in the ‘Women and Danger’ episode of Sneak Previews in 1980, using some of the same language. His partner Gene Siskel also noted with disgust that he saw couples on dates at I Spit on Your Grave, before seguing into expressing concern about audience members imitating the behaviour of the characters – an implication that he thinks those women were in danger from their dates. It has at times been claimed that horror films have inspired terrible real-life crimes. Scream became a key example, with purported copycat cases, including the 1998 murder of Rita Castillo in Lynwood, California (by her own son and nephew), the 2001 murder of Belgian teen Alisson Cambier by neighbour Thierry Jaradin, and the 2006 murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart in Pocatello, Idaho. In the latter, the two teenage killers shut off the power, wore masks and stalked her before stabbing her twenty-nine times. Other serial killer movies like Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, American Psycho and Saw have been accused of inspiring crimes, but so have supernatural-themed films like The Exorcist (the murder of James Horgan in Ireland in 1973), Interview with a Vampire (the attempted murder of Lisa Stellwagen in San Francisco in 1994), Child’s Play (1988) (Tasmanian spree killer Martin Bryant), Child’s Play 3 (1991) (the UK murders of James Bulger and Suzanne Capper) and Warlock (1989) (in La Ronge, Saskatchewan in 1995, a gruesome case of child murder and cannibalism by a fourteen-year-old boy).

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