Brands of creepiness
Looking at the American version of creepy. I got about halfway where I wanted, forgot what I was trying to say, and left off.
So as I was watching the Twilight Zone (the original), it occurred to me that America has a certain brand of creepiness that I doubt other cultures could replicate. (Though, it's the same the other way around, which is why American game makers fail so miserably when they try to replicate the Japanese-version of creepiness.)
We don't invest heavily into religious fear (anymore), nor do we have an indigenous culture that really made an impact on ours (think New Zealand and the Maori people). We don't have a whole lot of history that influenced how our creepiness evolved, like Britain (and how everything that I've ever seen either slants to WWII or the monarchical eras from there, think Doctor Who and Gormenghast).
We place more value on the individual's efforts than we do as a society's collective whole, which means that we don't place as much emphasis on cultural symbols to evoke a sense of unease (think Ringu and the white shroud and how the English version failed because we couldn't translate the separate brands from one to the other). We enjoy imagining the eerie imbedded in the commonplace (though every culture likes to do that to some extent), but what's more interesting is that we keep the commonplace looking that way. No imaginative re-imaginings of Hell melding into reality.
But America's got it's own brand of creepiness. I'm not entirely sure what elements it has that are unique to it, really. And by that, I'm taking Rod Serling's Twilight Zone as an example to umbrella the other (good) examples. I mean, you can draw a lot of parallels to Twilight Zone and Stephen King's works, really- a lot of the same elements, but handled in different ways because of the different authors.
And it's not a "AUUGH ZOMBIE EATING MY FACE OFF" creepiness, it's more of the kind that gives you chills. (The first episode of the first season oh baby.) They generally try to say something about people, rather than society (which is a reflection on society, but whatever).
Probably one of the best examples is this incredible preoccupation and denial of death Americans have- although it was something we've always been incredibly familiar with, we've always had trouble dealing with it. (Which has morphed into our society's attempt to sterilize it, but Twilight Zone doesn't take place in the time where we were packing off sick people to hospitals and old people to old folk's homes.) Because we haven't been an inherently religious nation since, uh, the 1700's, we don't have a safeguard in our culture to balance the finality and horror of death. (As in, we don't have the comfort that God said it was their time to go, and if that is used, most people call bullshit rather than taking solace in it. [Unless you're one of the few practicing practicing Christians.])
And you can see this in Rod Serling's series- if his episodes aren't about impudent progression of technology, aliens/Communists, the folly of human nature (Mr Denton on Doomsday, Walking Distance), then it's about Death. And what's even better is that Serling's version of Death is actually something you can see mirrored in other American artists. Death is generally a drab and/or normal figure, generally a trustworthy one, but never implicitly malicious. In Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's book Still Life With Crows, a little old lady remnisces fearfully about what her father said Death would look like: just a man in a black suit, all alone, approaching you.
Which says a lot, right? No Grim Reaper, no hell hounds, no sorcerers or witches, no supernatural beings. Just a guy. A guy who happens to either be wherever you are wherever you go (that hitchhiker episode), or a completely normal guy who you can't help but be wary of (Nothing in the Dark or One for the Angels.)
So we have a habit of normalizing the unknown, and making the familiar eerie (think of any of those episodes with eerie towns). These are things every culture does to some degree, but the way we go about it is unique to us.
And instead of using society's larger teaching to instill a lesson, or using cultural symbols to represent something (think again of Ringu and just how formulaic characters and ghosties were- they followed patterns because that would be the way in which the movie would be most successful in scaring the piss out of its audience), we use people. Maybe it's because we don't have such a heavy religious basis (and our superstitions are actually more like folklore than tied to anything concrete), but we seem to assign people as having the most potential for evil. Not ghosts, demons, what have you.
Conversely, when we really want to scare people, we do use things like aliens and ghosts, but alone and not in context of our society. Because they're so out of our experience consuming creepy stuff, they tend to scare us more- because it's not the bizarre maquerading as the commonplace. It's the bizarre being all up in your face and going to eat you. Still, these aren't terribly popular, and after there's been a certain amount of response, the general consensus is that the media relied on cheap tricks to get you scared. Think Aliens- it's not as scary as it used to be, mostly because of popular opinion. Or think Dracula made into a movie in the 1930's.
What do you guys think?
So as I was watching the Twilight Zone (the original), it occurred to me that America has a certain brand of creepiness that I doubt other cultures could replicate. (Though, it's the same the other way around, which is why American game makers fail so miserably when they try to replicate the Japanese-version of creepiness.)
We don't invest heavily into religious fear (anymore), nor do we have an indigenous culture that really made an impact on ours (think New Zealand and the Maori people). We don't have a whole lot of history that influenced how our creepiness evolved, like Britain (and how everything that I've ever seen either slants to WWII or the monarchical eras from there, think Doctor Who and Gormenghast).
We place more value on the individual's efforts than we do as a society's collective whole, which means that we don't place as much emphasis on cultural symbols to evoke a sense of unease (think Ringu and the white shroud and how the English version failed because we couldn't translate the separate brands from one to the other). We enjoy imagining the eerie imbedded in the commonplace (though every culture likes to do that to some extent), but what's more interesting is that we keep the commonplace looking that way. No imaginative re-imaginings of Hell melding into reality.
But America's got it's own brand of creepiness. I'm not entirely sure what elements it has that are unique to it, really. And by that, I'm taking Rod Serling's Twilight Zone as an example to umbrella the other (good) examples. I mean, you can draw a lot of parallels to Twilight Zone and Stephen King's works, really- a lot of the same elements, but handled in different ways because of the different authors.
And it's not a "AUUGH ZOMBIE EATING MY FACE OFF" creepiness, it's more of the kind that gives you chills. (The first episode of the first season oh baby.) They generally try to say something about people, rather than society (which is a reflection on society, but whatever).
Probably one of the best examples is this incredible preoccupation and denial of death Americans have- although it was something we've always been incredibly familiar with, we've always had trouble dealing with it. (Which has morphed into our society's attempt to sterilize it, but Twilight Zone doesn't take place in the time where we were packing off sick people to hospitals and old people to old folk's homes.) Because we haven't been an inherently religious nation since, uh, the 1700's, we don't have a safeguard in our culture to balance the finality and horror of death. (As in, we don't have the comfort that God said it was their time to go, and if that is used, most people call bullshit rather than taking solace in it. [Unless you're one of the few practicing practicing Christians.])
And you can see this in Rod Serling's series- if his episodes aren't about impudent progression of technology, aliens/Communists, the folly of human nature (Mr Denton on Doomsday, Walking Distance), then it's about Death. And what's even better is that Serling's version of Death is actually something you can see mirrored in other American artists. Death is generally a drab and/or normal figure, generally a trustworthy one, but never implicitly malicious. In Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's book Still Life With Crows, a little old lady remnisces fearfully about what her father said Death would look like: just a man in a black suit, all alone, approaching you.
Which says a lot, right? No Grim Reaper, no hell hounds, no sorcerers or witches, no supernatural beings. Just a guy. A guy who happens to either be wherever you are wherever you go (that hitchhiker episode), or a completely normal guy who you can't help but be wary of (Nothing in the Dark or One for the Angels.)
So we have a habit of normalizing the unknown, and making the familiar eerie (think of any of those episodes with eerie towns). These are things every culture does to some degree, but the way we go about it is unique to us.
And instead of using society's larger teaching to instill a lesson, or using cultural symbols to represent something (think again of Ringu and just how formulaic characters and ghosties were- they followed patterns because that would be the way in which the movie would be most successful in scaring the piss out of its audience), we use people. Maybe it's because we don't have such a heavy religious basis (and our superstitions are actually more like folklore than tied to anything concrete), but we seem to assign people as having the most potential for evil. Not ghosts, demons, what have you.
Conversely, when we really want to scare people, we do use things like aliens and ghosts, but alone and not in context of our society. Because they're so out of our experience consuming creepy stuff, they tend to scare us more- because it's not the bizarre maquerading as the commonplace. It's the bizarre being all up in your face and going to eat you. Still, these aren't terribly popular, and after there's been a certain amount of response, the general consensus is that the media relied on cheap tricks to get you scared. Think Aliens- it's not as scary as it used to be, mostly because of popular opinion. Or think Dracula made into a movie in the 1930's.
What do you guys think?