Halloween reminds us that it can sometimes be fun to explore the dark side. And the rise in popularity of horror movies of the last couple of decades seems to confirm that.
A Virginia Tech Professor of pop culture is taking a closer look at scary movies to see what they tell us about the stereotypes that drive them.
Appalachian Studies Associate Professor Emily Satterwhite is not a huge fan of horror movies, but she’s forcing herself to keep her eyes open even during the gory parts to take a closer look at what’s behind their growing popularity and what they say about rural Appalachia.
“I was intrigued by how many have a rural setting and I was intrigued with trying to figure out how and why the same story told over and over again had the capacity to be pitched as horror or what there could be about the rural that would be so fearful.”
Satterwhite lays out the kind of familiar plot line, which has become a trope, a cue for viewers that it’s time be afraid.
“You have your outsiders coming to go camping or traveling through the rural back woods. There might be a cabin and they’ll be set upon by locals and they won’t make it out alive in the most recent versions.”
The 2010 spoof Tucker and Dale vs. Evil starts out like so many horror movies with that fateful camping trip, but soon turns the horror movie genre upside down giving us a different perspective on the usual themes.
“Just because it does such a beautiful job of lampooning all of the stereo types about what there is to be feared in the woods and it turns out in that movie it’s the prejudices of the young people, the outsiders that they should fear the most and that’s what gets them into trouble is the assumptions that the men wearing overalls are the bad guys.”
Satterwhite wrote a book called Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878. And when it comes to horror movies, she says there are real effects from the way rural Appalachia is portrayed. For example’s she’s heard from people promoting the travel industry in West Virginia, that some people are afraid to visit because of horror movies.
“It’s very obvious to me how harmful the stereotypes and how negative they are but what I’m really interested in is if one of the reasons for the fascination for the continuous coming back to the idea of a rural world cut off from the nation and the world is a kind of wishfulness about that, a fear that sure, of what would happen in any kind of fish out of water scenario but also for that particular fish out of water scenario to be popular again and again, I wonder if people really want to believe that there can be a place that has somehow escaped consumer capitalist society for better and for worse, but it’s the better that I’m interested in and that’s why I’m combing through hundreds of online customer reviews to back me up on this hunch.”
Satterwhite will teach a humanities seminar next semester at Virginia Tech on the function of horror movies.
