[Book Review] ‘New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror’ (2021)

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This review originally appeared in Dead Reckonings no. 29 and has been reprinted with the permission of the author.

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One of the things I like most about horror is its range. Horror can be represented across the full spectrum of media and found lurking within even apparently-conflicting genres. I look back over the past few years and think beyond the obvious horror-homes of film and TV to examples like Tom Wright’s harrowing stage adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the haunting and hauntological sci-fi horror art books of Simon Stålenhag or even Cryo Chamber’s ever-expanding discography of sinister, abyssal dark ambient. Horror doesn’t have to be, as Lovecraft famously asserted, just “secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” In fact, horror is sometimes most effective when it manifests quietly, in an unexpected place. The word “apparition,” after all, is related to the Latin apparere; “to appear silently, as a servant appears.” 

Which means that, to me at least, New Blood’s focus on film and TV horror—and often fairly extreme, gory examples of film and TV horror—feels, ironically for a medium that privileges the power of sight, slightly myopic. 

That said, it isn’t fair to look at New Blood based on what I would like it to be rather than what it is. Equally, in its defense, all three of the book’s editors are involved in the discipline of Film Studies so maybe it’s my expectations which are at fault rather than theirs. So let’s dive in and try to remember that the subtitle of “Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror” should really be read as “Critical Approaches to Contemporary TV and Film Horror.”

New Blood’s essays interrogate a number of subjects; from the history of horror film festivals like Cine-Excess, through the curiously resilient presence of Nazism (and Nazi zombies) in horror to a discussion of the sometimes-problematic terms like “prestige” or “elevated” when attempting to bring horror to a state more accepted by cultural gatekeepers. Out of these, however, I was fascinated by Thomas Joseph Watson’s “The Kids Are Alt-Right,” where he uses Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 film Green Room as a lens to investigate contemporary politics and political violence in the US (and, by extension, in the rest of the world). Watson excels in not simply describing his chosen text’s themes—something which a few of the book’s other essays suffer from—but by engaging with how it both predicts and reflects the real-life horror of bigotry, fascism, and white supremacism while simultaneously revealing it as a standpoint based on instilling fear in others to hide one’s own fears. Watson points out that Green Room’s villain Darcy doesn’t necessarily believe fascist ideology to the degree he expects of his followers but rather is “only really interested in protecting his own livelihood as a dealer of heroin.” To do this, Darcy enacts violence against any threats through his underlings; he becomes “an invisible orchestrator of violence,” initiating violence whilst hiding himself from the consequences of that violence. This echoes the claim of French philosopher Michel Foucault that “power’s success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms,” and Watson uses this to equate Green Room’s examination of specific violence to “a wider systemic discourse of oppression and control.” Similarly, it is when Darcy is fully revealed near the end of the film that his power, and therefore his ability to instill fear, is diminished to a point where it no longer exists; “You were so scary at night,” admits protagonist Pat. Although some viewers may think this is anticlimactic I find it to be a very interesting, and strangely hopeful, inversion of the traditional horror film reveal of the monster in all its terrifying glory. Watson’s great insight here is that horror like Green Room shows us that monsters can be defeated by showing us how monsters can be defeated.

The other surprise success in New Blood—a surprise for me, at least—was Neil Jackson’s reappraisal of the notorious “Euro-snuff” A Serbian Film. Jackson positions the film as one which “defines sexual violence as culturally embedded” whilst, sensibly, not being over-enthusiastic in praising its qualities; he readily admits that the film is “doubtlessly crude, abrasive and hysterical.”  From this standpoint Jackson examines A Serbian Film as an attempt to work through the wounds of the Balkan conflict and its lingering trauma before widening his view to a broader investigation of “porno-capitalism.” This is an interesting concept as it implies that not only do consumers sell themselves to capitalism by buying its products but capitalism sells itself to consumers by offering those products. This creates two options for those within the capitalist system; either continue within the increasingly extreme cycle of offer/purchase or attempt to resist it. As evidenced by the events of A Serbian Film these choices lead either to dehumanization or destruction, respectively. Like Watson’s view of Green Room, the monster of A Serbian Film is, for Jackson, not the people who act out the film’s narrative but the systems that allow, even force, that narrative to exist. I found this a powerful reading of a film which, I have to admit, I had initially dismissed out of hand and Jackson’s argument that A Serbian Film goes “far beyond its manifest ability to run the somewhat limited gamut of shock, disgust and revulsion” is a compelling one.

Had New Blood included more essays of this caliber and had it broadened its remit beyond a Western view of visual horror—even the chapters on J-Horror are concerned with how Western audiences misunderstand the breadth of Takashi Miike’s work to pigeonhole him as a horror auteur or how consumption of Japanese “Otherness” is often fetishized by Western marketing—then it would be an invaluable reference for the first decades of twenty-first century horror. Even a more accurate description of the book’s focus on that remit, which is a perfectly valid one, would have removed a lot of my frustration with it. Perhaps these frustrations are just me being nit-picky and I admit that it’s impossible for one book to cover every facet of a genre as wide-reaching as horror but New Blood’s presentation, as well as the Horror Studies series’ statement that it is “dedicated to the study of the genre in its various manifestations – from fiction to cinema and television, magazines to comics, and extending to other forms of narrative texts such as video games and music” doesn’t make me feel that guilty about it.

New Blood is definitely a valuable text, especially for those interested in the more extreme end of the visual horror spectrum, and it’s no doubt one I will return to but I would dearly love to see a future collection that truly covers “contemporary horror” in its full plumage. 

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Article written by Dan Pietersen

Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R. Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. He is a recurring guest lecturer for “The Last Tuesday Society” and the “Romancing the Gothic” project, where he produces an ongoing series on Haunted Houses and related topics. He has also contributed criticism and reviews to publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horror Homeroom. Daniel lives in a very old house in a very old town and is slowly becoming very old himself. He occasionally appears on social media as @pietersender.

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